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

My advice for such situations is this: if, after careful analysis of your insight practice leads you to the conclusion that you are in Re-observation, resolve that you will not wreck your life through excessive negativity! Resolve this strongly and often. Follow your heart as best you can, but try to spare yourself and the world from as much needless pain as is possible. Through sheer force of will, keep it together until such time as you are willing to face your sensate world directly and without anesthesia or armor. I have seen what happens when people do otherwise, and have come to the conclusion that, in general, things go badly if people do not follow this advice, though some unexpected good can always come from such situations.

The framework of the Three Trainings and the three types of

suffering that is found within each of their scope can be helpful here as well. Since people are generally not used to facing fundamental crises of identity, i.e. the basic issue in Re-observation, they are not familiar with the pain of fundamental suffering. Being unfamiliar with the pain of fundamental suffering, they are likely to imagine that it is actually suffering produced by the specifics of their ordinary world. However, if you have gotten to Re-observation, in short, if you have found these 200

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techniques to be effective, have faith that the remaining advice may be of value and try to fulfill this part of the experiment. That is, if you are in Re-observation, the task that confronts you is to dissociate the fundamental suffering you now know all too well from the specifics of your life in an ordinary sense.

Following this advice may sound dangerous, heartless or bizarre to some people. It is a valid criticism. In an ideal world, we would not have to go around second-guessing ourselves and the sources of our suffering in the specific way that I advocate here. In an ideal world, we would really have our psychological trip together, be able to stay with the practice during these stages, and thus cross quickly through the Dark Night and finish this practice cycle. It definitely can be done.

However, we are not always ideal practitioners, and thus the Dark Night often causes the problems mentioned above that need to be dealt with somehow. My solutions to what happens when we cannot or will not do insight practices in the face of the Dark Night are also not ideal.

However, the outcomes are likely to be much healthier in the short and long term than those that come from simply allowing unrestrained Dark Night bleed-through. Strangely, I have come to the conclusion that simply practicing is often much easier than trying to stop Dark Night bleed-through if we are willing to just try it, though it can easily seem otherwise. The old kindergarden evaluation, “Follows instructions, plays well with others,” is still a valuable standard in the Dark Night.

Not restraining one’s negativity and reactivity in the Dark Night is a bit like getting stinking drunk and then driving in heavy traffic rather than just sitting down and waiting to sober up. Not continuing to do insight practices in this stage is like going into surgery, opening up an incision, making some repairs, and then freaking out because the patient now has a big, bleeding incision and running away from the operating table, leaving them there to suffer. You could think of many ways to make the patient happy and try them all, but until you close up that wound they are gonna’ be pissed! Unfortunately, in this case you are both the surgeon and the patient. Face the wound and close it up! You obviously have the necessary skills, as you have gotten this far. Use them. The operation is nearly over.

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There are also those who try to investigate the true nature of their psychological demons and life issues but get so fixated on using insight to make them go away that they fail to hold these things in a wider, more realistic and appropriate perspective. This subtle corruption of insight practices turns them into another form of denial rather than a path to awakening. Drawing from the agendas of training in morality, in which there is concern for the specific thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, they fail to make progress in insight, whose agenda is simply to see the true nature of all sensations as they are. Both are important, but it is a question of timing.

I have come to the conclusion that, with very rare and fleeting exceptions, 95% of the sensations that make up our experience are really no problem at all, even in the hard stages, but seeing this clearly is not always easy. We tend to fixate on strong sensations when they arise, those that are very painful or very pleasant, and in these times we can miss the fact that most of our reality is likely made of sensations that are no big deal, thus missing many great opportunities for easy insights.

Further, the Dark Night can bring up all sorts of unfamiliar feelings that we rarely if ever have experienced with such clarity or intensity. Until we get used to these feelings, they can frighten us and make us reactive because of our unfamiliarity with them even if they are not actually that strongly unpleasant.

I highly recommend using physical sensations, such as those of the breath, as the objects of inquiry during the Dark Night whenever possible, as plunging into emotional content, even with the intention of investigating it, can sometimes be a very hard way to go. Remember, whether we gain insight through investigating physical or mental objects is completely irrelevant! Insight is insight. Choose objects for investigation by which you don’t get caught whenever possible. The best thing about reality, particularly in the Dark Night, is that you only have to deal with one little flickering sensation at a time. Staying on that level when doing insight practices is an unusually good idea. Pay attention to what is right in front of you, but keep your attention open.

All of that scary stuff said, there are people who breeze straight from the Arising and Passing Away on through the whole of the Dark Night in as little as a few easy minutes or hours and hardly notice it at all, so 202

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don’t let my descriptions of what can sometimes happen script you into imagining that the Dark Night has to be a gigantic problem. It absolutely doesn’t. These descriptions of what can sometimes happen are merely there to help those who do encounter these sorts of problems to realize that these things can happen and so be more able to deal with them skillfully. There is no medal awarded for having a tough time in the Dark Night or for staying in it for longer than necessary, much to my dismay.

One of the more bizarre potholes we can fall into in the Dark Night is to become identified and fascinated with the role of The Great Spiritual Basket Case. “I am so spiritual that my life is a non-stop catastrophe of uncontrollable insights, disabling and freakish raptures, and constant emotional crises of the most profound nature. My spiritual abilities are proven and verified by what a mess I am making of my life.

How brave I am to screw up my life in this way! Oh, what a glorious and holy wreck I am.” Both my sympathy and intolerance for those caught in this trap is directly related to the amount of time I have spent in that trap being just like them. Whereas we should not try to pretend that the Dark Night hasn’t made us a basket case if it has done so, we should neither revel in being a basket case nor use the Dark Night as an excuse for not being as kind and functional as we can possibly be.

One way or the other, when we finally give up and rest in things as they are without trying to change them or be them, i.e. are very accepting of our actual humanity as well as clear about the Three Characteristics of mental and physical phenomena, there arises...