The 7 Stage Model

(con't)

So is there an entirely universal process of transpersonal development? I'm not sure. I am really starting to suspect that the analogy from conventional development-- i.e., piaget's stages-- is just an analogy, and that post-conventional and to an even greater degree transpersonal development occur at right angles so to speak from the earlier conventional development. And even if the clear-cut stage approach was true, it seems that even in higher conventional development the similarities-- although universal-- become less significant to the process as each higher level exhibits a greater variety of expressions. For example, the sensorimotor stage is limited by basic physics and the morphogenesis of the human body, right? Yet, at the formal operations level, you have very diverse expressions, such as a stalinist beurocrat, an Obama democrat, and a staunch Palin republican.

And all of that is within the context of a single linear unfolding of higher structures, which I think is probably not accurate for a couple of reasons. It seems more likely that post-post-conventional development occurs in a radically assymetric way with regard to the earlier conventional and post-conventional development. The upshot of which is, go ahead and explore and map all you want-- just be careful about making universal claims about what is possible and how to go about it. That's all!

Hello, Owen.

What I believe doesn't really matter but since you asked us to weigh in: I suspect that whatever further development there is might look like, and might feel like, the emotions are permanently "grounded" (again, I'm not sure what that actually means so I'm being cautious). I suspect that every living human being has emotions, period. That's my operating assumption until proven otherwise, and the only way that could happen is for me to experience no emotions. I'm just not going to take anyone's word for this. Kenneth didn't before and I won't now, to whit:

"I am the kind of person who doesn't believe something just because someone else says it or writes about it; I have to see for myself." -- Kenneth, in post #97

The reason I'm saying this is that I suspect emotions are of a somewhat deterministic nature - physical, electro-chemical, neurological. Humans may be adaptable to a point that it feels like emotions are "grounded" but that the processes that create them remain intact. I have no idea what mechanisms could create that situation but hold out the possibility that meditation might ultimately lead to that kind of result.

For example -- Kenneth has said several things about his emotions that are true for Kenneth but appear somewhat contradictory from the outside. He said, here in post #97, " I did not believe it was possible to stop getting angry until I stopped getting angry." That sounds like he does not experience anger at all, but he has also said that he does experience emotions, or at least that he can identify emotional energy as it arises and he knows which emotion is the cause.

(continued)

Bottom line - there is no way to submit this question to empirical study, at least in any practical way for us, here.

Finally, my bugaboo, language. The descriptions of the changes experienced by meditators and monks and others through deep and extended practice are so variable, culture and tradition dependent that it's really hard to sync them up and make heads or tails of them. I could describe my own practice in hundreds of ways and some of those would sound so vastly separate one could assume they are from different people experiencing vastly different things. The reverse is also true. Reports of meditative experiences are so unreliable as to be almost useless in exercises like this. I'm not disbelieving anyone here, by the way, just explaining my thoughts on your questions.

In the end -- who knows? We live in the not knowing

"
That's my operating assumption until proven otherwise, and the only way that could happen is for me to experience no emotions. I'm just not going to take anyone's word for this. Kenneth didn't before and I won't now, to whit:
"

PCEs or direct mode for a period is one way to see. It was the only way I saw how the mind/body organsim is experienced without "emotions" for short periods. It was insightful for many of us. And it wasn't detrimental in anyway like some think in fact it set me in the direction I find myself going now. None of us took Tarin nor Daniel's word for it. We went out and experimented a little to satisfy the urge to see for ourselves. THat is what it takes.

Okay, Nick. Let me amend my comment to say that the only way for me to believe it ("it" being the permanent "grounding" of emotions) would be for me to experience "it" for an extended period of time, as measured in months or maybe years, not minutes or hours. We all experience short periods with no emotions as far as I can tell.

"
Okay, Nick. Let me amend my comment to say that the only way for me to believe it ("it" being the permanent "grounding" of emotions) would be for me to experience "it" for an extended period of time, as measured in months or maybe years, not minutes or hours. We all experience short periods with no emotions as far as I can tell.

"

Not like PCE's. Not in my expericne and that of others. But that is something you can do or not do. A lot of what we are ethused about here, for some of us, (that further development in the direction that Kenneth and Owen talk of) was triggered by the extended experience in PCEs or direct mode. It was a means to insight, Chris. I know it has the scary dubious unattractive whatever AF background for some, but remove it from that, and it's just prolonged periods of apperception. It ain't one taste/non-duality/clear light/rigpa etc. It is distinct in my own experience. And you gotta go out there and cultivate it to judge it correctly. It can last a number of days too. It's the convincer. Not what anyone writes.

So are we all talking on the same page? I think what I've mentioned has something to do with that answer.

Nick

Kenneth and I talked a bit about this last night.

I would submit that we had a discussion about the importance of vunerability. We talked about how the fact that someone starves hurts us. When someone is angry it hurts. We don't want to lost the capacity to cry, in fact we want to be vunerable enough to be able to feel things fully. In AF there is talk of losing something physically. There is no negative emotional response in the body (I think). That's not what's being talked about here. It's the mind's reaction to what goes on bodily that changes. You can still weep.

I was including the PCE and brief encounters with "direct mode" in my comments, Nick. Those are not, at least as far as I know, a permanent state, which was the object of Owen's questions - the permanent grounding of emotions. At least that's how I read it. YMMV, of course. Here's what Owen asked:

"Do anyone here believe that the developmental process can be extended to the point where the emotional reality is **permanently** grounded in brahmaviharas and the conceit of a self is ended?"


Mumuwu -- whose experiences are you describing, yours? Or is that something Kenneth said to you?

Oh sorry, it was my understanding from a conversation I had with Kenneth last night.

I accept that I could have misunderstood what he was saying though.

(cnt'd from above)

One key element for me right now is to keep admitting to myself that I don't have any answers. It's always possible to run with an idea, get painted into a corner with it, start defending it, and live in that concept. If, for example, I puff out my chest and intone, "I have overcome emotions and am no longer affect by the petty concerns that used to plague me," I'm just creating another proxy life. None of that feels free or right to me. The only thing that feels right is to stay open, dance around, stay light on the feet, report what this experience looks like in some particular moment, understanding that this moment is conditioned and everything will look different in the next moment. I like to come back to the body again and again. A thought comes. "I may be wrong." Fine, fair enough. How does this feel in the body? Another thought comes. "Yeah, but..." All right, fair enough. How does this feel in the body now? This is the only life I have, and there are no conclusions to be drawn. How does this feel in the body now?

This baseline of Brahma Viharas along with the moment by moment dance of being present in the body is my current practice, which is not distinguishable from the "rest" of my life. There is another aspect to this, which is that there is no longer anything arising that is recognized as "I", but you were specifically asking about the emotional component.

As a followup to what Mumuwu wrote in post 106, here is a passage copied from an email I sent to a friend yesterday in response to his question about my current relationship to emotional pain:

My practice lately is about vulnerability. I just try to let everything in, including (and especially) pain. In my experience, pain is always physical and can come directly from a physical stimulus (like being stuck by a pin) or can arise along with a mental impression (like a thought that someone feels angry with me or hurt by something I've done) or from directly feeling another person's pain or anger when we spend time together. The pain that arises along with thoughts or while being with someone else who is in pain is as real to me as the pin-prick kind of pain.

So when I talk about the emotional transformation that marks the 6 of the 7 stages in my model, it has nothing to do with being invulnerable or immune to being hurt by others. It's really just the opposite; I feel more vulnerable than ever and at the same time willing to allow the hurt to come. This has brought a new level of contentment and freedom. The ability to feel both kinds of pain while still being content within the moment is another way of saying "compassion," which always seems to come in a package of contentment, compassion, lovingkindness, and equanimity. It looks to me as though the four Brahma Viharas are just different aspects of one subjectless, non-polar emotion that is more fundamental to our nature than the polar emotions that wiggle around at the surface. All of this starts with a sense of well-being and acceptance of whatever is arising in this moment.

(cnt'd below)

Kenneth, that is very helpful and seems to be a far cry from "I do not experience emotion." My next question would be where/how does the pain of anger arise in you?

Thanks!

Edit: I realize this is now getting to be an old/worn-out topic, so no need to respond. This is just what popped for me when I watched the first two sections.

Hi Kenneth.

I will watch the videos--I've had time to watch two. It's good so far, but I don't think I've gotten to the new stuff yet. Will comment when I do.

One comment on what I have seen: I don't necessarily agree with the Jeffrey Martin test at 4th path. I think whether one says one is enlightened depends very much upon one's reference set, particularly once alive to the possibility of post-4th development. I've sat in physical proximity with a number of post 4th path persons--in 6 and 7, generally speaking--and the bodily feeling one gets is so different from a 4th path person that I'd have to think hard about that question if I were asked. Am I enlightened like they are? No, certainly not. Am I totally unenlightened? No, not that either. So somewhere in the middle, in which case I think Jeffrey might do better interviewing someone else.

Here's a video where Adya really gets to the heart of it; 4th path people (IMHO) still grasp energetically. I also think he embodies the difference when he is talking here; you can feel just what he is saying.

I like the shift in practice + self-as-mirage + off-the-ride + complete circuit criteria for 4th path, particularly with the new stages being floated.

Yours,
Mark

"My next question would be where/how does the pain of anger arise in you?" -cmarti

Hi Chris,

I didn't say that I feel the pain of anger. For me, that language doesn't capture the reality of it, because it assumes that there really is something called anger. I'm saying there isn't anything called anger any more than there is water in a mirage. So, rather than saying I feel the pain of anger, I would say it like this: I feel the pain of this body as it responds to this life, and I recognize it as the pain that I would in the past have associated with anger. It may seem like splitting hairs, but that distinction is key.

Most Buddhists can accept that the self is a misperception, even though they are not quite able to see through it all the time. What is not so generally understood is that emotions are the same; just as there is no self, there are no emotions. There are just phenomena that are mistaken as "things" called emotions. Debunking these mirages in real time changes the experience. It doesn't make you less human, it just makes you simpler. Instead of having to peer through the filter of these misperceptions, you can bypass the middle man and see pain as pain, thoughts as thoughts.

At the same time, there is nothing to prevent someone who has seen through these mirages from using conventional language to communicate. You can still refer to "yourself" as "I", and you can still say "I feel annoyed, or irritated, or angry." But that isn't exactly accurate, because you don't experience yourself as an "I" and if you ask yourself even in the heat of a difficult situation if you feel angry, the answer will always be "no."

(cnt'd below)

(cont'd from above)

This is a huge shift in the way the world is experienced. Also hard to accurately describe.

To answer your question about where the pain is experienced, it's all over the body. It could be anywhere: chest, head, neck, jaw, legs, arms, shoulders, the usual suspects. Tension, tightness, contraction, aching, throbbing, and the like are all unpleasant sensations that signal that the body "doesn't like" something. This is part of our conditioning. Some of it is idiosyncratic (I get grossed out when people chew with their mouths open) and some of it is almost universal (we all get grossed out when we step in dog poop). In either case, the answer is not to reject the sensations and thoughts or try to be rid of them, but to accept them, open to them, and see them as what they are: sensations and thoughts.

I know that this last paragraph is not news to you and in fact you have always been quick to point out that there is no need to escape unpleasantness in order to be content or free. You are right about that, and I include it here for context. This other part, the understanding that emotions as we normally define the word are just another mirage to be seen through is the part we are really discussing here.

Language is flexible, and each of us is free to define a word in his or her own way. This is why Bernadette Roberts can insist that the "emotions have to go" while Adyshanti can point out that "awakening uses all the emotions." (In both cases, I've paraphrased from memory, but I believe I have the gist of the quotes.) When you consider the context in which they say these things, though, I believe they are both describing the same situation: there is a radical shift in the emotional life at a certain place in the development of a contemplative. I call this shift the 6th of 7 stages in the hybrid model.

Thanks, Kenneth.

Is it fair and accurate to say, then, that you do not experience emotions as emotions (things/objects) but rather as unbundled components? That's the impression I get from reading your comments. You seem still to have processes that occur that arise and are caused by your experiences of the world. So to say that you do not experience emotions or that you do but not at all as you used to strikes me as purely a semantic difference.(Per your last paragraph.) This, as you say, could lead to vast misinterpretation and probably has.

Is this change you have experienced a kind of dropping away? I'm curious because I would use that language to describe pretty much every insight I've had -- they are removal of the veils that obscure what is "really going on."

Here's an interesting commentary on the Khemaka sutta that Owen posted previously:
The Scent of "am"
theravadin.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/the-scent-of-am/

Bumping... hoping to get Kenneth to reply to my questions in post #115.

I second the bump, if only because my understanding of Kenneth's new take on "emotions" is similar to what you've described, Chris. I would love to hear Kenneth expound on this "semantic difference" a little further.

To offer a bit of my own take, just so as to have a foundation to build on (or against!) it seems to me that the way we normally view emotions is to take a group of body sensations and thoughts and combine them together in a sort of emotional shorthand. Like "WTF" instead of "what the..." well, you get it.

What I understand about this so-called "6th Stage" is that these conjunctions of thoughts and sensations, that we used to have to identify en masse in order to effectively deal with them, can now be understood as simply the individual sensations (or to continue the metaphor, the words "what" "the" and "frick") and that we no longer need to hold the abbreviation of teh emotion (of "WTF") as a stand-in those sensations/thoughts.

This deals with the "polar emotions" on the surface of our emotional life, leaving us with the underlying happiness/soft contentment that is always going on below the surface. A zen teacher once described it to me as a happy song that is always playing in the background.

Seeing through the "polar" surface emotions allows us to take them or leave them. Me, I'm not sure if abbreviating your thoughts/sensations into an "emotion" is necessarily something I want to do away with entirely (so long as I can always remember that that "happy song" plays on regardless) but luckily I'm not yet at a point where I have the ability to make that decision.

Anyway, just my two theoretical cents, to (hopefully) further the discussion a bit.

This is *my* take on what it means for there not ever to have been emotions, based on my own experience. (This is the cutting edge of my practice, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to explain it in English.)

Here's an analogy. Some parts of the body are more sensitive than others---one can discern two points of sensations 1mm away from each other on the fingertips, but perhaps at best two points that are no more than 5mm away on the back. (I'm just making up the figures.) On the fingertips, when one feels a point of pressure, that "point" is like a circle of uncertainty with a small diameter; on the back, the circle of uncertainty has a much larger diameter.

It's also possible to have sensations from inside the body that, owing to a lack of sensitivity, are even more uncertain. One can have a feeling of pain in the stomach, but not have it occur at a particular point---it occurs in a vague way, spead across a region, with fuzzy boundaries.

So, imagine pricking your finger, and considering what it would be like if your fingertip slowly lost the ability to resolve where the pain was experienced. With full resolution, the pain can be localized to nearly a point; with a little less resolution, to a small circle; with a little less, to a much larger circle, then to somewhere on the finger, then to somewhere on the whole hand, then somewhere on the limb...

Imagine a pain that one couldn't localize at all. Then it might be described as "a general feeling of ill or malaise", having something to do with the physical body, but not anywhere in particular in space. (cont)

When I look at emotions in a certain way, I see that emotions are exactly like this---physical sensations that have lost all their localization, and are therefore (due to lack of localization) described as *mental* objects. But when experiencing what is called an emotion, there is no mental object. There is only an experience corresponding to one of these two cases:

1) body sensations + right discernment

2) body sensations + delusion

where "delusion" is the mental force that obscures being able to clearly see and localize these sensations. The sensations themselves may be pleasant or unpleasant, but the *real* suffering experienced during negative emotions is not from the unpleasantness of the sensations, but from how they are experienced when they lose their localization in the body and present as some kind of all-pervading malaise that runs through all of one's experience.

So, I don't see experiencing emotions as a kind of mental shorthand for bundles of other experiences, but as experiences of body sensations that have been totally obscured by delusion, and which cause suffering just because of this obscuration.

This is just what I understand at this particular point in my practice. I don't speak for anyone else and I don't know that my understanding is correct. I am definitely not claiming attainment of Kenneth's 6th stage. And I will say that while all this seems clear enough to me sometimes, at other times the cloud of delusion returns and it's a battle to see how what appears to me as a bona fide mental object (e.g. anxiety) could be something that I previously saw as illusory.

This is how i see it too, EndinSight! .

1) body sensations + right discernment - here, in my experience, an emotion is experienced as just sensations with a tone -pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. The triggered thought patterns and mind states tend to cease as soon as the sensations are seen and the thoughts observed. The discernment naturally puts a stop to the process of glomming or compounding phenomena. Sabbe sankhara dukkha ti, all conditioned phenomena are bummers! Dependent origination right there.

2) body sensations + delusion -In my experience, here is where the "bending" of the mind occurs supported by the sensations to compound into a sankhara (mental reaction/intention flavoured by a flow of pleasant , unpleasant or neutral sensations) and support for the illusory self and thus a full blown emotion like ecstatic happiness, anger, sadness, boredom etc. It is a process of cause and effect, sensations reacted to mentally to trigger a sankhara, to influence more flow of sensation in turn to be reacted to mentally again and so on and on. A process of becoming, becoming, conceiving conceiving.

"Then, just as a man, by following a snake that he has seen in his house, finds its abode, so too this meditator scrutinizes that mentality, he seeks to find out what its occurrence is supported by and he sees that it is supported by the matter of the heart. After that, he discerns as materiality the primary elements, which are the heart's support, and the remaining, derived kinds of materiality that have the elements as their support. He defines all that as 'materiality' {rupa) because it is 'molested' (ruppana) [by cold, etc.]. After that he defines in brief as 'mentality-materiality' (nama-rupa) the mentality that has the characteristic of 'bending' and the materiality that has the characteristic of 'being molested'." The Visuddhimagga XVIII5

Aren't all the physical sensations basically the same in that they are all just tension? The tension can be present in varying levels of subtlety, and depending on the location and intensity the tone is interpreted as pleasant, neutral or unpleasant? So isn't the tone, at some level, also a type of delusion?

My current experience and opinion -subject to change.

We seem to conceive of these emotions through blindly reacting to the sensations and in turn strengthening these particular habit patterns all in order to continue the flow of mind, to conceive and give birth to sankhara after sankhara, sankhara after sankhara. An endless display of becoming and concieving.

"The Blessed One said: "There is the case, monks, where an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person '” who has no regard for noble ones, is not well-versed or disciplined in their Dhamma; who has no regard for men of integrity, is not well-versed or disciplined in their Dhamma '” perceives earth as earth. Perceiving earth as earth, he conceives [things] about earth, he conceives [things] in earth, he conceives [things] coming out of earth, he conceives earth as 'mine,' he delights in earth. Why is that? Because he has not comprehended it, I tell you." Mulapariyaya Sutta -The Root Sequence

The above quote in my opinion, refers to "body sensations and delusion". The quote below is "body sensations and discernment".

"A monk who is a trainee '” yearning for the unexcelled relief from bondage, his aspirations as yet unfulfilled '” directly knows earth as earth. Directly knowing earth as earth, let him not conceive things about earth, let him not conceive things in earth, let him not conceive things coming out of earth, let him not conceive earth as 'mine,' let him not delight in earth. Why is that? So that he may comprehend it, I tell you." Mulapariyaya Sutta -The Root Sequence

www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html

"Aren't all the physical sensations basically the same in that they are all just tension? The tension can be present in varying levels of subtlety, and depending on the location and intensity the tone is interpreted as pleasant, neutral or unpleasant? So isn't the tone, at some level, also a type of delusion? "

I think, from my own experience, physical sensations are not where the tension originate. The tension is always mental. It is nama, the vedana/feeling aggregate. The tones of sensations being read and perceived by the mind are what create any tension felt. That tension is the mind holding a sensation in a certain way, with either craving, aversion or ignorance/dullness. Mind is chief and forerunner!

This is my current subject to change opinion.