The Progress of Insight

You can read The Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw's The Progress of Insight right here online.  It's pretty short and very interesting if you are actively meditating.  It is not, however, an introductory meditation text.  For that, you should read his Practical Insight Meditation.  And if you don't meditate at all, then this is unlikely to be very interesting, since it would essentially be like reading a map of Mars.   Which maybe conversely suggests that if you're someone who gets into reading maps of Mars, you might also like meditating?

I got turned on to Sayadaw by reading Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  In fact, that book is mainly a much longer re-write of the stages of insight laid out in The Progress of Insight.  These books are two examples of what is apparently an ancient genre that maps the levels a meditator passes through on their path towards enlightenment.  

If that last sentence -- with its mention of "levels" of insight that implicitly ascend towards a peak called "enlightenment" -- bothers you as it did me, then you might not want to read either of these books.  Because the truth is that meditation maps can cause problems.  Even their proponents would agree to this.  Thinking in terms of levels and progress and what should happen as you meditate can lead you down a variety of dead ends.  I can relate to some of these problems because I have felt them myself.  You can start mis-shaping would should be a personal empirical exploration to fit someone else's normative experience of meditation.  You can get caught up in comparing your level to others'.  Even without this competition, you can get stuck desperately grasping at the experience that would signify your progress to the next level, which can backfire, blocking that very progress. 

And yes, I just used the word "progress" in a way nearly indistinguishable from the one I was moments ago critiquing.  Because the truth is that you will progress in meditation, just the way you can progressively improve any skill you consciously practice.  I have also seen this progress for myself.  It implies a clear comparison of levels -- I have no doubt that the level I was at when I started two years ago is "below" the level I'm at now.  With this comes a clear metric for speed as well -- I have no doubt that spending an hour a day practicing this skill improves it more "rapidly" than spending 15 minutes a day.  So, while I have a general mistrust of the word progress in connection with qualitative goals like enlightenment, I wouldn't want to deny the feeling that such a thing exists, even if I'm not at all sure where I'm progressing to.

But then, if you can see this progress for yourself as it gradually unfolds, and if knowing the hierarchy of this progress in advance may cause problems, why would anyone who has reached a point where they feel they can see the process in its totality think it helpful go back and write a complete description for those moving along the path they experienced?  

Ingram has a clear answer to this question.  He wrote his book partly because, working without a map, he himself became mired in some of the difficult stages along the path.  These are the stages he calls the "dark night of the soul" and which correspond to Chapter 6: Purification by Knowledge and Vision of the Course of Practice in Sayadaw's book.  These are, by all accounts, not fun.  Ingram, experiencing them as a fairly young guy, ended up having a lot of not fun for a fairly long time because he didn't understand that passing through these feelings can be a normal part of progressing.  So a lot of why he wrote the book was to normalize these potential feelings for others, by placing them in the context he could only discover for himself after the fact.  

Sayadaw also implicitly answers this question, though his answer is different.  Right at the outset he clarifies who his book is for.  Spoiler alert: I am not the intended audience.

It is meant for those who, by attending to these exercises, have gained progressive insight as well into the whole body-and-mind process arising at the six sense doors, and have finally come to see the Dhamma, to attain to the Dhamma, to understand the Dhamma, to penetrate the Dhamma, who have passed beyond doubt, freed themselves from uncertainty, obtained assurance, and achieved independence of others in the Master's dispensation.

There's a little footnote that clarifies this further.

The preceding sequence of terms is frequently used in the Discourses (Suttas) of the Buddha to refer to those individuals who have attained to the first supramundane stage on the road to arahantship, i.e., stream-entry (sotapatti), or the following ones. The term Dhamma refers here to Nibbana.

In other words, Sayadaw wrote the book for people who had already experienced everything in it once for themselves.  Many dangers of the map disappear in this context.  Instead, you're left wondering why anyone who already knew the terrain would need a map of it.  This too, Sayadaw clarifies, though implicitly, at the end of the book.

But although equanimity about formations has been attained, if the spiritual faculties have not yet reached full maturity, it just goes on repeating itself. Though he who has won (one of the lower) fruitions may be able to enter into it several times within one hour, yet if his spiritual faculties are immature, he cannot attain the next higher path within as much as one day, two, three, or more days. He abides merely in equanimity about formations. If, however, he then directs his mind to reach the fruition already attained, he will reach it perhaps in two or three minutes.

 

When, however, the spiritual faculties are mature, one who carries out the practice of insight for attaining to a higher path will find that immediately after equanimity about formations has reached its culmination, the higher path and fruition arise in the same way as before (i.e., as at the time of the first path and fruition), that is to say, it is preceded by the stages of adaptation and maturity. After the fruition, the stages of reviewing, etc., that follow are also the same as before.

 

Anything else concerning the method of practice for insight and the progress of knowledge right up to arahantship can be understood in precisely the same way as described. Hence there is no need to elaborate it any further.  

Arahantship, the final stop on the train, is the terminology for full enlightenment (though I gather there's some discussion of whether the Buddha himself was even more enlightened than this).  In Sayadaw's Theravadan tradition of buddhism, it would be the fourth path.  The first path, the first "supermundane stage on the road", is when you have completed the stages 1-18 one time.  To become an arahant, you have to do this three more times, but apparently each lap has the same structure as the first.  It makes perfect sense, then, for someone who knows the territory like the back of their hand to organize a map of it for someone who has only covered the ground just once, but who will need to traverse it again.

Since I have never experienced anything like the temporary cessation event of Nibbana that he describes in stage 12, I'm really not the target audience for Sayadaw's book.  I can relate reasonably well to the early stages.  Mind and Body.  Causation.  Arising.  Passing Away.  Even Dissolution, Fear, and Disgust.  These I have all experienced in varying degrees.  I can't say they've really been laid out in clear successive stages though, so I certainly couldn't tell you what level I think I'm at.  

Which begs the question of what I think of his map.  Since I'm not the target audience, it's probably not fair to judge whether the map is accurate.  In fact, since I can't even identify which stage I'm at, maybe I'm not on the map at all.  Maybe this is because the map is wrong, or just one possible map and not the map.  Or maybe it's because I haven't practiced enough to understand it.  I'll punt on judging the map and just tell you about the dangers and uses I've found for it so far.

I touched on some dangers earlier.  At first I was very resistant to this whole idea of Enlightenment as the endpoint of a series of stages.  The very first map I came across was the very different one in Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated.  While that book was actually very interesting, it also had a whiff of "Enlightenment in 10 easy steps!", free with your purchase of ginsu knives.  Having since strongly felt the progress of practicing a skill, I have softened on the idea that there can be levels.  I'm still wary of the implied endpoint though.  Maybe that could be reinterpreted as gradually rewiring the brain enough that you eventually do unconsciously whatever it is that you did consciously all those years as you sat on your cushion?  I don't know that this would qualify you as a religious guru, but it might at least define some sort of endpoint or plateau to the process.  Automatic meditation.  But mostly for me, the implied endpoint -- interpreted as constantly feeling anything like the highly altered state of minute 56 of my meditation -- feels so far away that the issue doesn't seem urgent.  

The other danger I mentioned was the tendency to grasp at the experience you've read signifies the next level.  This has a natural egotism to it.  I want to improve.  I want to feel like I'm better than I was.  So I want to have this particular experience, say, seeing a light, as proof that, yeah, I'm a meditative badass.  This can get in the way of just having the damn experience.  This is a little difficult to separate from another natural reaction, which is reflective of our fascination with novelty.  I in particular like to have new (for me) ideas.  To some extent in my meditation I'm always searching for a shiny new altered state.  This isn't to prove my level, but just because I enjoy the feeling of a new vista opening up.  Though I also feel smart in proportion to how often new vistas open up in my head, and I am very committed to feeling smart, so there's some ego to this aspect as well.  At any rate, I've noticed that my excitement on feeling some interesting new sensation can be multiplied by the possibility that this one marks a whole new level I've read about.  The two together can result in my being distracted by the feeling of excitement while the original sensation slips out the back door.  Once I've understood this danger of course, it becomes just one more feeling to be noted.  It comes and goes like every other, and isn't that dangerous.  

I've found the maps most useful when I dispense entirely with the idea of levels and progress, and think of the 'stages' as more literally features I might come across while wandering through my meditative landscape.  On your right, you can see the way your itch is shadowed by the intention to make the movement that scratches it.  To your left, if you squint, you can make out how there's a tiny feeling of fear as some new altered perception begins to form.  Sometimes these drugs are a bit too good.  If you go far enough down this valley, there's a spot where you can catch new experiences just as they hatch, at the singular inflection point where an inhale begins.  And if you go even further, you can follow it to where the river empties into the ocean and each sensation disappears.  There are obviously relationships amongst these various features of the landscape -- eg. it seems obvious to notice that sensations arise before you notice that they pass away -- but it seems secondary to arrange them in some overall order.  They are just things to look out for that you might miss on first glance.

For the moment, this is even how I would interpret stages that I have yet to experience.  I have been noticing a general lightening of my visual field as a meditation progresses, as if someone were turning up the dimmer switch.  At first, I thought this way simply the timing of the dawn as I faced out my window.  But the dawn changes time every day, often barely happens in Seattle at this time of year, and anyhow, I turned around to face inside -- this light is not the dawn.  And the weird purple spot that seems lately to appear just at the end of each meditation is also not from staring at the sun.  Without the maps getting me thinking about lights, I might have been slower to notice these, and I think there's little chance I'm inventing them just based on what I read.  So I count noticing these (relatively) quickly as a useful byproduct of my reading.

Likewise, is my recent experience of a sort of split in my consciousness between a bright, stable, empty expanse of light to my left and an ongoing stream on sensations to my right some pre-taste of cessation?  I've had some experience of "patchwork space" before, but not where there is qualitatively different stuff going on in each space.  I have no idea whether any of these experiences are the sign of anything.  But they are interesting in themselves, and I might have missed them if I hadn't already been primed to think about how odd it was that nothing was occurring in half my perceptual universe.

His consciousness, while carrying on the practice of bringing to mind (i.e. noticing), passes beyond the continuous occurrence of phenomena and alights upon non-occurrence.