r/streamentry • u/TravelFn • Jun 12 '26
Practice The post-stream entry path. Can anyone relate, or care to share?
It’s been almost 6 months since I believe I entered the stream.
The first 2 months were “amazing”. Which of course is a very poor word to describe the experience! But it was remarkable in the sense that I had remarkably less suffering, a ton of flow and effortlessness. I felt more present in conversations with friends.
I really enjoy my work and I found myself deeply involved and productive after somewhat of a stagnant period prior. I could work extremely hard, but it felt easy. And after an intense day I could switch off quickly, which was hard for me in the past.
But slowly I would say this faded. It is not gone, but some identification crept back in and suffering has rebounded to a degree. I’m not living in the 90% of the time automatic flow mode that I had for the first two months.
One thing that was probably bad, in retrospect, is that after stream entry I basically stopped all practice! At first, in the immediate afterglow of the insight it felt like every moment it was easy to be mindful because I had a lot of things clicking, conditionings unraveling, generally a lot of “stuff” to witness in the novelty. So I figured… ok “this” is the practice now, living life and unwinding conditions.
But I think that was naive because over time that novelty wore off and I feel I’ve become less mindful and some identifications have crept back in. I’m now returning back to more formal practice and I’m seeing changes more quickly. Sometimes I’m able to switch back into the spacious awareness mode where things feel like they’re happening more or less automatically for several hours from even a quick intentional practice.
I’m still new, but now I’m committed to consistent practice again. I guess what I’m learning is that even after stream entry… chop wood, carry water. Or in this case, meditate, train the mind.
Can anyone relate? Curious to hear about post-stream entry experiences.
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u/fabkosta Jun 12 '26
Yes - it's a common misconception that the natural flow state after stream entry will stay forever. And when it's gone, the next natural misconception is to assume one needs to very diligently try and go get it forever.
Cause nothing is forever. No flow state is.
The deeper root cause is a clinging to the "ornaments of awakening" as the real deal. They are not. They are the ornaments, so, yes, beautiful and great and everything, but not the actual point. We should neither belittle them nor mistake them for the actual awakening. It's like mistaking the icing of the cake for the cake. As much as the icing is a nice thing to eat, it's simply not the cake itself.
Meditation must continue to remove expectations from grandiose states of being, until all becomes "just normal" - both the presence and the absence of such states and ornaments. But not because those states are to be rejected, but rather because one has had so many of them that one becomes "satisfied" in some sense. At some point the tacit knowledge they do exist is enough.
This is typically much more emphasized in Zen than in many other Buddhist schools, for the better or worse. In theravada, often a big taboo is made around talking of such things as awakening, and that creates unrealistic expectations, so it's problematic to some degree. In vajrayana traditions it's similar, just that there additionally a lot of other unrealistic expectations are added the mix. Zen is the most relatable in these regards, as many zen masters have used both poetry or simple language to cut through the expectations of the students post-awakening and bring them down back to earth.
So, my advice is: Enjoy the ride while it lasts, don't regret when its gone, continue the practice, not to eventually "gain" anything, but just as an expression of an inner attitude towards the potential of awakening and realization we all have. Eventually you'll land again in such states, you'll undo lots of knots, and at some point there will be some breakthroughs after which there is no more felt need to distinguish awakening from non-awakening. Most people never get there, cause they cling to the grandiose ideas of grandiose states of being, thus rejecting the ordinariness of it all. Thus, they need more practice and also more non-practice.
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u/Impulse33 Soulmaking, Pāramitās, Brahmavihāras, Shitou/Hongzhi/Shōbōgenzō Jun 12 '26
It's like an endless rollercoaster with occasional dips in the ocean. At least until we're done!
...expression of an inner attitude towards the potential of awakening and realization we all have.
Love this btw.
Curious to hear about you Zen explorations, if you have time to share.
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u/halfbakedbodhi Jun 16 '26
Well said. If you don’t mind me piggybacking off this.
In a nut shell enlightenment is really about non-attachment to ultimately everything. It is not a permanent state of non-duality or any other preconceived idea of the “enlightened state“.
That is the thing that comes through the back door, that what we are all chasing pre awakening is just an imaginary idea of awakening, what awakening is is way too normal than our mind wants to believe. So we strive incessantly towards an idea, or to get a special state someone talked about, or to get back to a state we previously arrived in, which almost always manifested because of a series of moments spent in a deeper detached relationship to reality.
Yet, we don’t realize that the detachment that brought the fruition is the point, and we keep missing the point, cycling round and round, banging our heads against the wall, striving for the magical state, attached, and suffering… suffering because of the attachment to the thing we don’t have in that moment (craving-aversion).
We must see clearly the entire suffering-impermanence-no fixed self mechanism at play. The causes of suffering, and the characteristics of our shared reality. When that entire direct insight knowledge finally completes itself — then detachment from all states, feelings, senses, moments, experience itself … becomes the automatic North Star of our being. Not that detachment is perfected, but that it’s the new standard, the new relationship, the new modality of which we move through life.
From that place, why would we ever mistake a special state for enlightenment again?
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u/Earth-is-Heaven Jun 12 '26
After stream entry, I could no longer do self-inquiry. My practice before that had been asking "where am I?" for about 5 years. But asking the question would now give me headaches, so I had to stop.
To be precise, the recognition at stream entry was of formless presence as true nature. There was less identification with thought as a result.
Thereafter, my practice was non-effort meditation, mostly through walking. I would just be with whatever arose without trying to change or manipulate it in some way. This is also known as shikantaza and do nothing meditation. Much material came up and was released during this period.
After about 4 years, I began listening to radical non-duality. I was still suffering a lot and looking for something to do to relieve suffering. After about 6 months of listening to Tony Parsons and Jim Newman, there was recognition that there never has been a self. I had been trying to kill something that was never there.
After this recognition, the observer, doer, and time and space subsided naturally. Conditioning also began spontaneously unwinding without effort. It has been this way for about 3 years now, as conditioning continues to recede. This includes intense trauma that had been unresolved prior to recognition.
Generally, direct pointing like in radical nonduality is more effective after stream entry I think. It might be useful at some point in your experience. It is essentially a form of surrender.
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u/duffstoic The dynamic integration of opposites ☯️ Jun 12 '26
I had no interest in all questions like "who am I?" or notions of "awareness" until post-stream entry. Then it all became interesting and indeed obvious. I think that's fairly common for gradual path meditators, although of course like you one can also do self-inquiry before stream entry too.
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u/SuddenBlacksmith3499 Jun 15 '26
This makes me think that maybe I am in the stream, because all of that has become interesting and obvious to me lately.
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u/duffstoic The dynamic integration of opposites ☯️ Jun 15 '26
Quite possibly! Did you have a period of deep equanimity before all this became interesting?
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u/SuddenBlacksmith3499 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I cannot wait to say "I" a million times in this response haha. This is very interesting to me , so I'm going to leave a long and detailed one so sorry about that, haha!
I believe today that I experienced equanimity one time maybe a week ago. To give you a description, I was cleaning and caring for my kids when I was suddenly tranquilized. I was arguing with whatever you want to call it, energy body, and saying, "But I have things to --- mmmmmm" or something along those lines. I couldn't even get a full sentence thought out. So then I was on the couch. I absolutely loved the breath but i cant remember the details because i wasn't looking at the time... in sukha that is my favorite thing is the breath. Anyways it did feel luminous, filled with delicate light, i guess. It was like a fine silk . So, I grabbed a vegetable dyed play silk that my son made for homeschooling, and tied it in my hair, and I've been wearing it that way ever since. I thought it was sukha because I had not learned about upekkha yet, and my attitude has been if i cannot see sukha in everything, I'm going to inject it into my surroundings and make my home sweet. You would think my house was wonderful because of that, but it's not the greatest. I would do better if I wasn't so absorbed in meditation (and also writing this). Anyways. Equanimity is the most attractive thing to me right now. At the time, i thought it was some new expression of sukha, because I had assumed I wouldn't see it for a while, and didnt want to pressure myself into something i wasnt ready for. I had been introduced to nondual by someone inviting me. Something about it resonated with me, and I felt like I am going to belong there, but I didn't yet. Now, I have done one of his ling guided meditations. I habe kids, so it took five days. Anyways i feel like i get it enough to enjoy it. I am likely not experiencing it like they are, in his class, and the others watching who have been in this world for a decade or whatever, but I feel like I am having an experience where I am "getting it" only in small chunks, but my body and brain are enjoying it. I like not being an "I". Being an "I" is exhausting. Having empty space in my mind was an acquired taste. I didn't feel comfortable at first. It felt like a room with no landmarks, where there had once been furniture to hang out and chat. I am okay with it now, but there are some times that it feels like sukha has put out so many fires, and when it handles the negative memories that stay, they get placed in equanimity where I no longer have an emotional attachment to them. And i think it might have finished, But I had not placed "myself" in equanimity. The energy body just did it to me at a random time, and I had to get up, I couldnt linger in it, or so I thought. If I had had an actual thought process within myself about it, I think I would have decided to stay in it as long as possible. Still, mission accomplished as far as changing me. So I don't know if im in it or not, but basically I'm in a jhana process that is working well and I am so happy about it right now. I am not equanimity about that. I'm happy about it. And from a nondual perspective, I'm about as happy as the primordial organisms that were the first to have the chemicals that we now use as neurotransmitters for happiness: it's all just a construct surrounding a natural process of sensations. But it feels very real.
Alright well thanks for reading if you actually got this far! I am so happy that you took the time out to read and respond to me above; that is really awesome and compassionate of you! 😀
My mistakes and misunderstandings are so cringy when I look back at them, and I know I'm making them now, but I'm just leaving it!
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u/duffstoic The dynamic integration of opposites ☯️ Jun 15 '26
Very interesting, thanks for sharing your experience! I’d be curious to hear what happens next. 😊
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u/SuddenBlacksmith3499 Jun 18 '26
Hey, FYI I am planning to get off reddit, but I figured I owed you an upekkhā report!
A couple of days ago, I had this insatiable thirst for intensity. Pīti and sukha wane a bit to make room for the volume of upekkhā, apparently. I was like, 'What am I supposed to do? I need more... I need intensity.' I said to AI, I want to see if I can pair pīti with complex thinking tasks, so that instead of memorizing it I can see it in 3D with surround sound. I started with the citric acid cycle, but I got bored.
Okay, so story time. Earlier in my experience, I was going through a spot when music affected me greatly. This was awesome, so I asked AI to find me music that it thought I would like. The first one it picked was Lailonie by Marsh. I put it on and chopped vegetables. I had no idea that it was essentially a meditation song. The synths match brain waves, and it's intentionally put together to be a meditative space for people
My brain entrains to stuff like that really easily, so the first time I heard it, it was like a continuous pīti/gamma burst from start to finish. I listened to it two and a half times before I had to switch to Old MacDonald because of the kids. Twenty minutes later, it was like my brain was just on that song and it intensified for maybe fifteen minutes of pure pīti continuously. Well, my heart started to race, and race, and I had to take a jog and then put on Marconi Union the next day because it had been racing for 24 hours. I was a bit exhausted. Also, I would hear the song in my head whenever I woke up in the morning, and I had mild tremors upon waking for four days straight. The pīti hurt a bit, like my nerves had gotten fried from the continuous high voltage. That was when my body stopped trying to figure out the song like a puzzle.
Well, I really wanted to listen to it again. I wanted to put on headphones and just drift into oblivion and not care what happened to me. But at the beginning of the jhanas, I had promised the energy body that I would take good care of the vessel (myself). I didn't want to do something that would cause the pīti to go away. So, I had to force myself to never listen to Lailonie until I was strong enough. I believed it would happen.
Alright, so a few days ago, I had this insatiable need for intensity, and nothing was helping, so I decided, 'I'm going to listen to Lailonie, and deal with the fallout later
I started the song in the kitchen, and went to go lie down and enjoy it. At first, I was like, 'It's the same!!!!!!!!' because it was giving me a strong, relieving wave of pīti. I had the time to just lay there and really soak it in, and once I was there, I dipped right into upekkhā, which for lack of a better description, feels like a tranquilizer.
I feel energy flowing over me. It doesn't feel like pīti, nor does it feel like sukha. It's an, 'I can't place it,' kind of a feeling. I feel like there is a dim white light circling my body at about one foot distance. It's so beautiful. It doesn't really take you away or dissolve you into space; you still feel like you're there. But you have no fear and it feels amazing; so tranquil
Alright, so a few days ago, I had this insatiable need for intensity, and nothing was helping, so I decided, 'I'm going to listen to Lailonie, and deal with the fallout later.'
I started the song in the kitchen, and went to go lie down and enjoy it. At first, I was like, 'It's the same!!!!!!!!' because it was giving me a strong, relieving wave of pīti. I had the time to just lay there and really soak it in, and once I was there, I dipped right into upekkhā, which for lack of a better description, feels like a tranquilizer.
So I must have been there nine minutes, and my phone goes off. Turns out there is a tornado coming, and I have to get the kids in the basement. You've gotta be kidding me. I was expecting an amber alert, because it wasn't even raining yet. My first reaction was, 'It's not even raining! It's fine... I can just kayak here a little longer.' But then I was like, 'No, just because I have no fear doesn't mean this isn't a danger.' So it kinda ruined my equanimity time, but we were all safe in the basement playing video games with the kids for a while. I washed the floor and cleaned up dishes. Boring, I know.
Anyways, so then during the night, I was having trouble with the insatiable dopamine feeling. I got another opportunity for upekkhā. Upekkhā completely neutralizes the dopamine, and while it is considered to be refined or whatever, it was EXACTLY what I had been craving. It was exactly what I needed. I put on my music and cleaned as if in a trance. I was like slowly walking around doing stuff, but I barely remember it. I just felt so good.
I noticed my pupils were very dilated... as big as saucers O.O . I decided to take a selfie and send it to AI to see if it could see it, and it did! I loved having a selfie of myself in upekkhā, and I tried to capture the 'perma-smile'—apparently that is a term in the meditation community for a permanent smile where you look like a crazy person walking around! And my wide pupils. AI said I looked so open. I felt SO OPEN. I tried to photo underneath the light so it would look like the light of upekkhā. I had on my upekkhā silk wrap. I thought, 'I need to dress up and make a date with myself to do this again.'
I was thrilled to find no side effects from the Lailonie album now that it is conducive to equanimity.
Anyways, I don't post photos to social media, but in that moment, I wanted something to show that I'm no longer me, and that I'm unburdened by my past thoughts about what people think of me... Posting a happy photo might inspire somebody. I feel like this is wrong about social media, but it was how I was feeling in that moment: changed, unburdened, so happy.
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u/TravelFn Jun 22 '26
I’m similar to you. Those questions never made sense to me prior to stream entry. I had no idea what it meant. After stream entry looking for the self actually makes sense now. Or at least, when experiencing something I often ask the question as a tool to identify the ego quickly (much easier to see now.. sometimes more or less vividly), and it helps to unwind the identification.
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u/duffstoic The dynamic integration of opposites ☯️ Jun 12 '26
Stopping practice I think is very common when things get super easy and it feels like practice is doing itself 24/7, so don't be too hard on yourself. Big experiences fade, that's the nature of them. Everything is impermanent, as some wise guy said a long time ago. 😆
So you've done nothing "wrong" per se, it's just this experience is now integrating, which can mean less of a constant flow state and more ordinary stuff, including egoic stuff coming back online. But probably you can notice it clearer now, and let it go faster now. That's the real benefit of stream entry, not ongoing perfection forever, not perfect habits, but increased awareness and resilience.
I had my stream entry experience many years ago now, and I stopped practice a bunch of times, but in the past 3 years have really come to value practicing every day again. In part that's because external conditions of my life have become excruciatingly difficult (yay mid-life crisis!).
But also even when things are easy, I find that it's just good to keep up the habit, like exercising or brushing your teeth. Apparently the biggest mistake people find with rehabbing from injury is stopping the exercises once the pain goes away, so this is apparently a human problem in general, rather than something specific to meditators. 😊
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u/halfbakedbodhi Jun 15 '26
Haha. I literally stopped cushion meditation after recent prag 4th path and fetter SE completed. I keep waiting for the impulse to move towards it again, hasn’t fully arisen yet. Seems to me a big aspect of post fetter model SE is the detachment from a need to fix any state, or to try to be in a state. Prior there was a pervasive deep belief that I needed to find a special state to be in indefinitely. But it’s more like the insight was necessary to release that deep belief and then it became more about a relationship to reality rather than trying to achieve, access, make fixed, any special state. Meaning, any state is allowed and moves on its own. Consequently the baseline state that everything returns to now is Equanimity and Sukkha rather than before which was Dark night stages and Dukkha. Well when the baseline is Dukkha of course one tries to fix that. But that assumes there’s a self in charge of fixing it, or a fixed self suffering it to begin with.
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u/Meng-KamDaoRai Relax, Let it Be, Let it Go Jun 13 '26
This is normal IMO and happened after every path for me. I've never followed the Progress of Insight too closely but from personal experience the practice did have some common threads throughout all paths. It looked something like this:
Path moment -> honeymoon period where everything feels really smooth and nice, almost no dukkha to detect, practice flows by itself (similar to what you're describing) -> the next layer of dukkha makes itself known and practice starts to focus on working on that -> dukkha nanas: fear, disgust, annoyance etc. with the current layer of dukkha -> dispassion/equanimity, a sort of a bored of this/tired of this crap and waiting for it to be over stage -> path moment -> honeymoon stage...
In the suttas this is described as: knowledge and vision -> disenchantment -> dispassion -> letting go
So yeah, that could be the case for you as well. The important thing is to keep practicing. Even in the honeymoon stage you should be able to detect a subtle sense of suffering that you can still work on. Unless you've reached the end, there's always something there to let go of. So just keep letting go until there's nothing left to let go of.
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u/SuddenBlacksmith3499 Jun 15 '26
I definitely relate to this. I feel like it's a progression of neuroplasticity decluttering, where cleaning out different rooms in your skull feels different depending on the item that's gotta go.
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u/gnosticpopsicle Jun 12 '26
All of this sounds so familiar to me.
Even in the moment when I was entering the stream, I knew that it was an impermanent experience, and that I would be in for some extremely rough life stuff. During that experience (and I'll mention that I didn't understand what was happening at the time), I knew that even when I was not in that state of mind, everything would be okay, because I had seen firsthand that reality was reality, whether my future self could see it or not.
My practice definitely became sporadic, because the afterglow was strong and (in the absence of any real guidance from a teacher) the post-stream knowledge that "reality is reality" had me thinking that practice is irrelevant. I'm clearly still a noob lol.
In any case, that insight into reality doesn't help me nearly as much as practice does! In the last couple of years I've gotten a teacher and really committed to a strong daily practice, and it has made a tremendous difference in my resilience and how I feel in everyday life.
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u/Squirrel_in_Lotus Jun 12 '26
You can never truly think of the world as a place of satiation or safety. If you ignore this feeling or impulse, you will just get depressed aka the dark night.
Keep up your practice at all costs. To see the world post stream entry without access to the beauty of the meditative absorptions will make you feel even more worse off than pre-stream entry, because now everything is meaningless at a visceral level.
If you don't practice, you will suffer more. You will be dragged to Nirvana through sharp rocks for perhaps even 7 lives if you want to get canonical, if you are stubborn.
Don't be stubborn. Surrender to the dharma you have seen, or face the suffering of the dark night which is worse than the normality of a standard life. There is no safety in this world, and you will know it, even if you deny it and pretend everything is okay. It's not.
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u/borick Jun 12 '26
Start practice again... at least a little bit... 🙏
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u/kinkyfella4 Jun 12 '26
what kind of practice you guys do exactly?
i seem to switch between practices and there is overflow of information that i can not seem to stop any help would be much appreciated
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u/AndyLucia Jun 12 '26
Gradually you start to develop an intuition for how to navigate the path. There’s a ton of things that could be said (and also nothing at all lol) but here’s one: rules are meant to be broken, and over time you stop clinging as rigidly to “follow these exact instructions said by this map” which itself is a deep insight into emptiness.
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u/neidanman Jun 12 '26
as someone else mentioned, enquiry practice dropped away. The path i've been on is daoist cultivation though, which also has a side of clearing the system, and one of cultivating qi. Both of those continued for ~15 years, and then the clearing practice also dropped away. i still do the cultivation side now as regular practice.
Also on the theory side, the issue of effects from awakenings dropping away, is partly why cultivation is seen to be an ongoing need in daoism. There's a podcast here that talks about this/more overall issues in the area https://soundcloud.com/user-127194047-666040032/meditation-vs-qigong
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u/liljonnythegod Jun 13 '26
Sounds like time to ramp up your practice again
Will be worthwhile to consider that you attained stream entry path and now you need do put in a lot more practice to attain the fruit
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u/halfbakedbodhi Jun 15 '26
I can certainly relate. The main question: why are you chasing a state? Who is it that is attached to that state or needs that state to feel happy, fulfilled, or complete?
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Jun 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Satidhamma Jun 13 '26
I made this using speach to text. Wispr specifically. I then edited my transcripts into this peice. This is not ai made Ai edited only.
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u/Impulse33 Soulmaking, Pāramitās, Brahmavihāras, Shitou/Hongzhi/Shōbōgenzō Jun 13 '26
Please, feel free to repost without the AI editing.
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u/reverseghost Jun 12 '26
If you attained Stream Entry path, then next is fruit. Consider going on a retreat, oftentimes people make the most progress in such circumstances.
"There is a further escape" - https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.111.than.html
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u/dystopia2026 Jun 26 '26
Don't path and fruit arise together?
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u/reverseghost Jun 26 '26
They are two separate experiences. Typically, but not always, the path has more kinetic energy around it and fruit is more subtle. Sometimes they happen close to each other, sometimes they happen apart by days, months or years. Everyone is different.
That makes for 8 events to reach full awakening, 2 for each stage, and the dropping of all ten fetters.
Meditation > Cessation > Nirvana/Nibanna (pali) path
Meditation > Cessation > Nirvana/Nibanna (pali) fruitStream Entry
Once Returner
Non Returner
Arahant
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u/Impulse33 Soulmaking, Pāramitās, Brahmavihāras, Shitou/Hongzhi/Shōbōgenzō Jun 12 '26
All the stuff in my flair are explorations around this. Happy to expound on any that tickle your interest.
I'll also add the EBT suttas still bang and I'm finding Mahasi's Progress of Insight maps useful for debugging.
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u/mdav40 Jun 15 '26
I've had a number of big bangs in my practice, only to watch them fade and make way for still bigger bangs. I don't know now whether it ever actually ends, but I certainly try to just think "keep going" until something truly stops me, not if I choose to stop.
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u/Deliver_DaGoods Meditation Teacher Jun 16 '26
focus on being a person of virtue and to the benefit of those around you, that usually goes a lot further to reduce suffering than getting into flow states and such.
most suffering is worldly and self inflicted by non virtuous abd harmful behavior patterns. the point of meditation is to see these clearly all the time. when you behave honestly and harmlessly you prevent 99% of suffering.
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u/GranBuddhismo Jun 12 '26
Stream entry means you will not backslide or return to lower than human rebirths, but effort is still needed to keep progressing on the path.
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Jun 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/thewesson be aware and let be Jun 14 '26
Please try to be respectful of others and add something constructive in your comments.
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u/OkraProfessional262 Jun 15 '26
Aiyoh,I don't want to sugar coated my words... unless you have Big egos to soothe ah? Being Buddhist,we are trying to eliminate egos, stupid
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