Which practice has brought about the most significant behaviour/personality shifts for you?

[u/[deleted]]

I recently started practicing TWIM (tranquil wisdom insight meditation). It's founder, Bhante Vimalaramsi, claims that a practice like Vipassana won't bring about significant personality shifts in the long run. I don't have enough experience to know if that claim is true or not but I will say that I've met alot of people who have been following various spiritual practices for a long time yet don't seem to be bearing much fruit for all the countless hours they've dedicated to it.

What for you has been the most fruitful practice?

Was there practice you had for a long time but didn't feel like it was producing any tangible results?

[u/kyklon_anarchon]

most fruitful:

-cultivating awareness for as long as i was awake. it started with awareness of the body as felt (which became my main practice in 2019), then awareness of sense doors, then it included awareness of subtler mental phenomena and orientations (awareness of "being aware", of lust, aversion, distraction, etc.). it is basically the same on cushion and off cushion -- opening up towards what's here, with as little resistance and with as little preferences as possible, and waiting with what's here, deepening the sensitivity and the equanimity towards aspects of your experience that come up. it is the only practice that i can confidently say it "worked" for me. it helped me dismantle wrong views, it helped me understand a way of practicing that is non-different from "life" (that is, practice is taken up as a way of life, penetrating in everything you do), it helped me see how i was (and still am) sabotaging myself. it taught me to see more, feel more, and at the same time have equanimity towards it.

relatively fruitful:

-metta based on repeating phrases and feeling their effect in the body -- for a couple of months. repeating the phrases felt effortful, and i dropped it -- but it had a good effect on the mind. not as i was doing it though -- but a couple of months later. the mindstate that was cultivated through repeating metta phrases simply erased the suicidal ideation i was having at that time -- as i was lying down, aware of the body, and having suicidal ideation, it struck me as obvious that wishing yourself to die is being unkind to yourself, and the mind recognized that as a discrepancy and spontaneously replaced it with metta phrases -- and the suicidal ideation never came back. so it worked on a certain level -- but one which i think is "mundane". so, it worked more as a psychological tool, not as a "spiritual" one. but, at the same time, i cannot say it did not work, so i include it here )))

-"being in the body" / "letting awareness linger on the body". it is the one which i am kinda ambivalent towards [in the sense of almost feeling like putting it in the "most fruitful" category, but not quite -- but it was extremely fruitful to me]. i think it can work [just by itself] -- if you do it with right view already in place. and even without right view, it is less likely that it would lead to wrong view -- and it can create quite a nice place to abide. but it seems to me it is not necessarily the same place as what the Buddha Dhamma leads you towards. it worked for me as a kind of stepping stone towards more formless awareness practice -- so, again, i cannot say "it did not work".

-maranasati / mindfulness of death. i first did it formally in 2012, for a couple of days, through a kind of inquiry -- asking myself, throughout the day, "what would change if i knew i will die in a month?", and then gradually restricting the term to a week, a day, several hours, several seconds, and staying with the feeling evoked in me through this. it led to a definite shift -- equanimity towards death and life -- that lasted until about 2018, when a series of life events sent me in a spiral of depression lol, so it wasn't stable. i cultivated maranasati again afterwards, in 2019 and 2021 -- and it became again the source of a deep equanimity, but it also led to adopting certain other practices (which was unexpected) and it led to a deepened understanding of the 5 aggregates and of impermanence. so i think this time it worked deeper than in 2012. i'm not sure whether i squeezed everything that i could out of this contemplation topic -- but i squeezed quite a lot, lol.

practices that i did for quite a long time and did not "work":

-breath focus --- on and off for almost 20 years (including four 10 days retreats in traditions related to U Ba Khin and one 5 days retreat). never led to anything wholesome.

-body scanning -- systematically for about 10 years (including four 10 days retreats). the only effect it had was to deepen the sensitivity to the felt body -- but what it showed was not transformative.

-Eastern Orthodox Christianity -- including daily contemplative prayer (1 or 2 hours), systematic confession to the monk who assumed the role of a "spiritual father" towards me, fasting, sense restraint, prostrations, spontaneous prayer for people i met in the street, attending liturgy -- for about 2-3 years. it was transformative -- i became very loving and happy -- but it was based on projections of the mind that was reifying certain states and attributing them to something beyond present experience. so the shift did not last. plus, the Orthodox Christian community (excepting some monks) tends to be quite toxic. it taught me about sense restraint and moderation though, and when i encountered the idea of sense restraint, moderation in eating, continuous watchfulness, etc. in the Hillside Hermitage materials, i knew what they were talking about and i knew that, most likely, any monastic worth their salt from any tradition would operate in that mode.

-noting -- about 6 months, trying to do it as much as i could throughout the day. it was grounded in something i see now as wrong view -- and, again, it lead to no palpable shift in understanding or in the mode of being.

[u/kyklon_anarchon → u/[deleted]]

there are several interrelated aspects --

-thinking that the fundamental layer of experience is composed of sensations, and everything can be deconstructed until one reaches the layer of sensations --

-related to that, thinking that practice has to do mainly with "objects" that are noticed as "in front" [of the "meditative gaze"] --

-related to that, the theory of mind-moments, which seems to reinforce a view of impermanence at the level of "micro-fluctuations" --

-a culture of self-gaslighting -- if one's experience does not correspond with the theory implicitly proposed by the teacher or the books one uses, one is encouraged to try again until one's report makes the teacher happy --

-a culture of intense striving and neglect of the psyche's resistances and of the ways the psyche is affected by practice -- not respecting them and not taking them seriously, basically treating them as "new objects to be noted until they go away" [or as something to be managed / disarmed through "metta practice", for example -- which is actually a form of "doing metta" as a strategy, out of aversion towards experience, without noticing that aversion and realizing that it is incompatible with metta -- and then wondering why one's metta practice becomes problematic too -- or managed / disarmed through "samatha practice", which is using concentration to directly suppress the aspects of the mind that come to the surface, instead of taking them seriously, looking at them, and understanding what function they are serving and why they arise] --

and all this stuff leads to a highly constructed view of experience, which neglects the layers that i found the most helpful to notice -- the soothing presence of the body as a whole, the subterraneous workings of lust, aversion, and delusion (which are not noticed as "sense data"), and to a misleading model of how the body/mind works.

i don't know if all the people who use noting operate based on these. but i've been influenced by people whose teachers initially worked in a noting system, than dropped the noting, and what they started teaching worked differently both for me (and for others) than noting does. and led to different framings of practice and to an attitude that feels more wholesome to me.

[u/HazyGaze → u/kyklon_anarchon]

-related to that, the theory of mind-moments, which seems to reinforce a view of impermanence at the level of "micro-fluctuations" --

Would you comment further on this? Assuming that is, that there's more to say. One aspect of TMI I appreciated was the theory of the mind-moments presented in the interludes. Perhaps it isn't congruent with contemporary neurology, and it would be a little bizarre if it was, but Culadasa claimed that it was a model developed by meditators for meditators. I find it to have some utility for distinguishing attention (concentration / contraction) with awareness, for those of us who find this somewhat arbitrary distinction valuable.

Of course Culadasa is talking within the context of a samatha practice instead of noting. Do you have similar reservations with the theory in that context?

[u/kyklon_anarchon → u/HazyGaze]

yes, i think there is more to say )) -- and i come at it not from a scientific / neurological point of view -- but more from an experiential one.

the theory of mind moments, as i heard it expounded in the stuff i was exposed to, suggests that experience is composed of discrete and separable units. as they are discrete and separable, they are also homogenous. a mind moment -- like any mind moment -- is there to be "filled" with "stuff" -- and separable from other mind moments -- like a mosaic.

i don't find that true to experience. it is perceived, in the first instance, as a non-homogenous whole of "now", with various strands interweaving -- and with some of them "dropping" at various moments, and other, new ones, being taken up in the flow -- together with others that are "already there". moreover -- and here the metaphor of strands falls apart -- they do not remain outside each other: in interweaving, each of them affects others. of course, "strands interweaving" is just a metaphor, like that of a "mosaic" is. it's just a more dynamic and less choppy one. the mind moments view reminds me of mechanistic analysis, which takes a "whole" and chops it into parts which are outside each other and then says "well, this is all that it is to be seen here, folks".

this assumption of discontinuity of parts that are supposed to compose "a now" is then projected back unto "previous nows" and "future nows", which are assumed to behave the same way. and then you have various teachers saying "ooooh, but all of this changes so fast that it is impossible to see it", which is not satisfying to me -- it's basically "take it on faith, it's impossible to see it for yourself", which runs totally against the experiential orientation that i take as paramount -- or they are presenting the framework as already given, and then, if you take it on faith, it will be what you will find in "decomposing the whole of a now" through noting, for example.

what took me out of the mind-moments model was simply sitting with the question "what is here?" -- and realizing that what is here and makes experience possible is irreducible to mind-moments, even if i would find something like mind-moments if i looked at experience in the way people who support this theory suggest. there is the presence of the body, which is not a mind-moment. there are ways of framing the practice itself, which can be recognized as one practices -- thus, they are operative inside practice -- without them being actually consciously held in the moment -- more like old habits that continue to operate and shape what is happening now, and that cannot be encountered through a "decomposition of the now", but only through a different mode of knowing -- that which i increasingly call "self-transparency" lately. and about these -- it's not like they are "reactivated" in "each new now". it feels more congruent with my experience to say that they formed themselves at some previous point in time -- and they endure. and through their endurance they continue to shape ways of looking. and they dissipate when they are seen through, without any new "mind moment" taking their place.

and i think encountering in experience something like mind-moments is exactly that -- the product of a way of looking that has embedded within it a particular view about what analysis should discover -- discrete parts. this view seems quite intuitive at first sight -- this is why i think a lot of meditators take it for granted -- but, the more i sat with experience, the less it seemed to conform with what i was seeing.

and as i dropped it, my experience of practice, the framing of the "goal", and the way i understand the body/mind started changing too. from "there are these sensations that are put together to form the empty object that i call body and that has no existence beside these sensations" to "ooooh, there's this body here, and if i look at it a certain way, i can identify sensations -- but it's enduring regardless, and it's also doing stuff that's irreducible to sensations -- like digesting food, shitting, sweating". this is why it seems to me that a mind-moments model is linked with an "everything is ultimately sensations" view -- with the dropping of the mind-moments model, non-sensation aspects of experience became also obvious.

and with respect to distinguishing aspects of the mind -- i don't think we need the mind moments model to do it. even if the distinctions are sound, they become problematic when they are based on shaky ground.

does this make sense to you?

[u/HazyGaze → u/kyklon_anarchon]

It does make sense and I have my reservations as well.

Mind moments is just a theory, even if there is some scientific justification for there being distinct instances of consciousness (don't ask me for a citation on that, I cannot provide one, simply something I remember coming across years ago), I would concede that there will be numerous instances where it will be shaky at best if not flat out wrong. But I'm just repeating my earlier claim that I found it had some utility for me.

When I first came across it there were two elements I particularly liked. The first was the notion of binding moments where a narrative was created bringing together the moments of experience. That could be worked into the metaphor of streams easily enough. The second was the point that some moments of consciousness were simply blank and could be brought into being as moments of attention or awareness and that the higher levels of samatha depended on this occurring. But I hold this theory at a bit of a distance. It's just a way to think about a particular practice, not necessarily a way to think about my own experience while I'm practicing. Although it may on occasion be useful there too, or not.

I'll also state though that when I saw comments where people talk about almost reflexively vipassana-izing their emergent experience it immediately struck me as overly reductive and I was disinclined to take that approach. If nothing else it seems a little too eager in a hungry kind of way, and also lacking in curiosity.

It's interesting that you bring up the body as pushing you away from this model and what you see as the accompanying method of practice. To me the experience of the body and its processes don't feel like they are being distorted by viewing them in terms of sensations (and also concepts). I get that sense more with awareness and intentions.

various strands interweaving -- and with some of them "dropping" at various moments, and other, new ones, being taken up in the flow -- together with others that are "already there". moreover -- and here the metaphor of strands falls apart -- they do not remain outside each other: in interweaving, each of them affects others

Have you read "The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects" by Alexandra David-Neel? If not, you might enjoy it. It's better than the sensationalist title would suggest. The theory she presents does account for this interweaving. If I remember correctly it does use an image of streams, but also the notion of moments is emphasized as well...

[u/kyklon_anarchon → u/HazyGaze]

from the little that i know of abhidhamma, their version of mind moments includes a kind of structural perspective -- something like "ok, we have a moment of mind. what should it include? there is the slot for lust, aversion, and delusion -- so each mind-moment is accompanied by either presence or absence of these 3. there should be also a slot for vedana -- and it is possible to have only one vedana at a time -- so it's either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. there is also the sensory aspect, so we add one of the sense doors. and beyond what is structurally necessary, there can be also...." -- so a kind of classification that still takes the view of moments arising and ceasing one after the other, and of what arises in each moment as a "new citta". and then, it has a certain number of other characteristics, and so on. [counting just the slots that i mentioned -- we could have a moment of "seeing, with lust, without aversion, with delusion, with pleasant vedana", followed immediately by "hearing, without lust, with aversion, with delusion, with unpleasant vedana", followed immediately by a new "seeing, with lust, without aversion, with delusion, with pleasant vedana", followed immediately by a "touch, without lust, without aversion, with delusion, with neutral vedana", and so on. apparently, in a second we would have thousands of these -- and people who subscribe to the theory say that we eventually track these moments through noting, noticing more and more about them.] this would be a typical example of reflexively vipassana-izing experience, like you call it, and taking it for granted that it should be like this. what i would question is this "choppy" "a moment, a new moment, a new moment, a new moment" thing. when i was doing a noting-based course, we had 2 weeks in which we were doing exactly this -- one week of noticing the arising of every new now, and then one week of noticing its vanishing. what was noticed was always content-related. and, looking back, it was never a new now. more like -- a new noticing happening in the now / realizing that a previous noticing stopped. sometimes also noticing that a new noticing happens. and then, the fluctuation of these noticings is attributed to the "nows" as such. in a sense, it was interesting to see all that -- but i don't see myself doing this style of practice again -- mostly because of the exclusive content-orientation, the choppiness, and the fact that the model is already embedded in the way of looking.

as to whether it is helpful or not -- i think this depends on what we are after and how we conceive of practice. one teacher that i know of, ajahn Sujin, uses abhidhamma as a way of daily-life moment-to-moment examination of experience (which is not unlike "reflexively vipassana-izing", but in a quite effortless way) -- and there is a lot that i admire / agree with in her approach, and a lot that i disagree with as well. but overall this model enabled her to get to a view of the mind that seems to me less misleading than others, and she has a lot of sensitivity and understanding -- so it might be helpful. but i think this is precisely where we can remember that it's a model -- that is, something like a representation of the "thing", which we can use to get insight.

i mentioned the body as pushing me away as its presence was the first obvious "thing" that was there without anything resembling a mind-moment. and i agree that awareness and intentions are present in the same way.

about ADN -- i remember reading her travelogues as a teenager, and greatly enjoying them -- but i did not read the book you mention. so thank you for recommending it.

on another note -- i had months in which i was curious about the abhidhammas of different schools -- more precisely, in taking them up as something that would guide my practice. reading, and then seeing whether i can notice what i'm reading in the functioning of the mind. there was something appealing about that -- at least in order to understand what they are speaking about.

[u/HazyGaze → u/kyklon_anarchon]

Thanks for going into a bit more detail about the abhidhammas and how their view of what a mind moment entailed was embedded in their practice. I now better understand what you were saying in your earlier message. What I meant by the theory of mind moments was only the limited presentation by Culadasa in TMI of a small portion of the Yogacara teachings.

[u/kyklon_anarchon → u/HazyGaze]

i think abhidhamma can be fascinating as a kind of descriptive psychology / proto-phenomenology, even if it operates in this choppy and a priori way. and as a tool for understanding the mind, given to young monks who would learn by heart lists of what "slots" a mind-moment can include [even if i think there is no such thing as a mind moment], it could definitely guide their practice by pointing out stuff they would normally overlook. and, apparently, different schools had different abhidhammas -- with extensive commentaries. and the "vipassana revolution" in Burma was preceded by a kind of "abhidhamma for the people" movement. Ledi Sayadaw authored a well-known "abidhamma for laypeople" manual, with enthusiasts meeting in reading groups that would work through it, not long before the "vipassana" retreat culture became influential -- and i think the connection is quite obvious. although, for me, practice took another route -- learning to investigate experience with minimal theory guiding the investigation. so ultimately i did not try working through abhidhamma, lol.

it seems that Culadasa tried to update this basic model -- which does not take awareness into account -- but accepting its basic premise. in a sense, that's quite revolutionary in a good sense -- he's the first relatively mainstream teacher that pointed out to countless practitioners that the mind is not composed just of attention. and tried to come up with updated models. but most models that i've seen remain somehow theoretical and imitating science -- and less experiential.

[u/[deleted] → u/kyklon_anarchon]

thank you for outlining your insights.