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

The advice here is: stick with it but don’t try to force it. Pay attention to balancing effort and acceptance. Remember that discretion is the better part of valor. Practice in moderation as well as maintaining a long-term view can be helpful. Think of practice as a life-long endeavor, but do just what you can each day. Stay present-oriented. Walks in nature or places with large, expansive views can help, as can exercise. This stage has the power to profoundly purify us, given sufficient commitment to just trying to sit with it, be clear, precise and accept all this despite the pain and anguish, both physical and mental, that it can bring. If on retreat: sit and walk according to the schedule, apply the technique as prescribed every second if humanly possible, and do not leave early!

This stage is actually a profound opportunity to see clearly the pain of the dualistic aspect of our attachments, aversions, desires, hopes, fears and ideals, as all this has been amplified to an unprecedented level. It is this stage that makes possible the path of heroic effort, diligent investigation of this moment based upon the powerful desire for enlightenment, as at this stage all of the unskillful aspects of this desire are beaten out of the meditator with a force equivalent to the suffering caused by them. You can actually get very far on highly imbalanced and goal-oriented practice, and it can give sufficient momentum and meditation skills so that, should you get your ass kicked in this stage, one continues making progress quickly anyway.

Again, if the meditator stops practicing here, they can get stuck and haunted by this stage in the whole of their life until they complete this first progress of insight. Their lack of practice will deprive them of the primary benefits of this stage (i.e., the increased perceptual abilities that allowed them to get this much insight in the first place) and reduce their chances of getting beyond it, and yet the emotional consequences can remain long after the skills in meditation have faded.

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They can become “Chronic Dark Night Yogis,” meditators that

somehow just don’t figure out how to get past this stage for very long periods of time. You would be surprised by how many of these people there are out there. Their failure to unstick themselves may be due to their own psychological makeup, poor instruction, imagining that the spiritual life is all about bliss and wonderful emotions, believing in absurd models of spirituality that do not allow for the full range of the emotional and mental life, or chancing upon this stage outside of a well-developed insight tradition, which is what happened to me at about age 15. I was a Chronic Dark Night Yogi for 10 years without having any idea what the hell was happening to me, so I can speak on this topic with some authority. Further, I have gone through numerous other Dark Nights at the higher stages of awakening and come across the same issues again and again. Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anywhere from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, e.g.

narcissism and delusions of grandeur (my personal favorites). Dark Night Yogis may act with a strange mixture of dedicated spirituality and darkness.

I mentioned that the A&P Event could impart a bit of the inspirational, radical religious leader quality to those prone to such things. For these same individuals, Stage 10 can sometimes have a bit of the paranoid, apocalyptic cult leader quality to it, a confused whirlwind of powerful inspiration and despair. Just because someone has borderline or antisocial personality disorder doesn't mean they can't make progress in insight, and when they hit these stages it can be pretty wild.

We may all have our own particular neurotic tendencies that come out when we are under stress, but if you feel that you are really losing it: get help, particularly from those who know this territory firsthand and are willing to talk honestly about it! Don’t be a macho meditator and get stuck, and don’t imagine that spiritual practice can’t cause some wild and sometimes unpleasant side effects. One of the best things about working with a thoroughly qualified and realized insight meditation teacher before we get into this sort of trouble is that they will have some 198

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idea of our baseline level of sanity and balance and thus know what we are capable of.

That said, I suspect that both the Mushroom Factor and the dharma jet set culture of teachers popping in and out with little chance for students to have meaningful contact with them off retreat contributes to the non-trivial number of Dark Night Yogis out there. I suspect that there are fewer problems with Chronic Dark Night Yogis in traditions where the maps of what can happen in this territory are well known and in which there are teachers who are very accessible and honest about their humanity and the possible range of the spiritual terrain.

On the other hand, sometimes genuine mental illness or unrelated emotional or psychological difficulties can show up in people’s lives.

Blaming it all on the Dark Night may not always be accurate or helpful, though if you have recently crossed the A&P Event and not completed an insight cycle or gotten into the next stage (Equanimity), there is going to be some Dark Night component mixed in with whatever else is going on.

Meditation traditions tend to attract what can seem like more than their fair share of the spiritual, emotional and mental equivalents of the walking wounded. Sorting out what is what can sometimes get murky and may require the help of both those who know this insight territory and those who deal with routine mental illness and emotional and psychological difficulties. The best combination would be someone who knows both. I have a highly enlightened friend who has found it very useful to take medication to treat his bipolar disorder. There is something very down-to-earth and realistic about that. These practices won’t save us from our biology. They merely reveal something in the relationship to it.

On the other hand, there are those that are so deeply indoctrinated by the models of “working through” our “dark stuff” that whenever it comes up they turn to psychotherapy or a whole host of other ways of getting their issues to “resolve” or go away. This view implies false solidity and an exaggerated importance to these things that can make it very hard to see the true nature of the sensations that make them up.

The trap here is that we turn a basic crisis of fundamental identity into a witch-hunt for the specific things in our life that we imagine are making 199

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us this dissatisfied with our basic experience. If someone has gotten to this level of practice, no amount of tinkering with the specifics of our life will ever solve the fundamental issue.

That doesn’t mean that some of the dissatisfactions with specific aspects of our life may not be valid, and in fact they often are quite valid. However, these relative issues get mixed in with a far deeper issue, that of who we really are and aren’t, and until this progress of insight has been completed, this mixture tends to greatly exaggerate our specific criticisms of those things in our life that could actually stand improvement and work. Learning this lesson can be very hard for some people, and the dark irony is that they may wreck their relationships, careers and finances, as well as emotional and physical health, trying to get away from their own high level of insight into the true nature of reality. Until they are willing to work on a more direct, sensate level, there is no limit to the amount of angst and negativity they can project onto their world. I have seen this play out again and again in myself and in the lives of my dharma companions. It can be a very ugly business.