Stage 5: Do you feel really, really alert?

Hi,

These are my experiences..

Just like any other mental states... alertness has various intensity levels. Like you mentioned, the kind of alertness we feel during video games, or any other life threatening situation can be extremely intense and often cannot be sustained for long periods because it is going to take a lot of energy and ultimately draining. Imagine playing video games for a whole day and how it feels draining at the end.

However, imagine the kind of alterness you feel while watching a warm sunset on your favorite vacation spot. This kind of relaxed alertness is quite invigorating at the same time don't feel like draining even if you have to maintain this for a long period. See how this alterness feels compared to dullness. You need to bring back the mind again and again to relaxed alterness when it slips to dullness.

One way to feel the relaxed alterness is to train the mind to see the body in awareness. During relaxed states our body feels extremely light and comfortable.

Hope this helps.

It's about more than alertness. No, drinking a bunch of coffee isn't the same :)

It's not too important that you can imagine or conceptually understand what it will be like now. What matters is that you do the practices that will let you experience it for yourself. In Stage 5 that is the body scan. In particular, what matters is comparing the breath at the nose before and after the scan.

Hello! I think it is expected that this can happen in the beginning of the stage 5 thing. First of all, of course each sit, when you do a technique that you are not fully trained and proficient in. Of course it is training etc. and you will drain out during meditation when it requires you a lot of effort.

Then I also think, that when you hit the stage 5 realms after breaking through the gross distractions level which is kind of the conscious/directed plane of thought. It just happens that you can feel like you are lacking stimulus. And due to the greater idleness (no longer moved by conscious thought), there can come up a little emptiness in the state that might lead to greater dullness developing. Maybe simply because the mind gets a little bored, especially when it is worn out by strenuous juggling with the mind.

Consider the interlude about the perceiving and non-perceiving moments. The key to breaking through dullness is raising the number of consciously/mindfully perceiving moments of the meditation object or introspective awareness. This is how I trained against the subtle dullness, by checking in to see if my attention/mindfulness were clouded. I kind of developed the means to recognize the lack of intensity, just like you'd train to see if you're distracted in the beginning stages. The key is, that when you recognize your clarity fading and the level of clarity on especially the object becomes like only subconsciously perceiving, or when you find that the awareness gets dull in the background making you loose touch connection of the object to the rest of the body, then you need to up some effort to observe the object and the awareness with conscious clarity again, and to connect the awareness and attention back together! Not much forceful effort, nothing physical that would involve much tension, just some conscious intention that you'd pursue to look through the veil and to disallow it coming back, until it stays out of the way. In the beginning it might help to involve a little force, next to the antidotes that can help bringing back clarity when the dullness is strong, but later you have to learn to overcome it with just that little willpower, without even twitching a muscle. You will see, that the clarity that comes when pushing away the dullness will also make it very much easier to stay with the object and to observe more details - but the dullness can take it away subtly in the background, so you must overcome it to maintain the clarity.

This can make you "break through" the fog, and clearing it up - in my experience, in the beginning it might be a lot of struggle, but later it becomes much easier, and once you gained proper concentration within such clarity, it clarity can become stable instead of the dullness, and then the dullness can get closer to be overcome. Training training training - not allowing the clarity to fade, but to reconquer it again and again. The body scan is such a good means to train it, because you'd constantly have to break through that fog to keep monitoring the physical qualities of the body, and instead of the danger of being hypnotized into trance by staying at the same spot and zoning away, you'd keep moving throughout the body keeping things interesting and less boring. At the same time you charge up mindfulness of body perception, and can expect greater clarity of the whole body after the scan. I believe it is necessary though to also learn to cope with subtle dullness while staying at the breath.

Another thing I found important is, trying to take enough time to get into concentrated state and all calm and tranquil and awareness established etc. before trying to conquer the dullness. I found learning to go through the stages (not 1:1 the techniques, but the progress through the associated states of mind) in each sit before doing the techniques helped me a lot not struggling prematurely. To conquer subtle dullness for example you need to get concentrated to a degree first, that would allow opening the mental awareness where you could keep monitoring on it and pushing it away with the willpower to perceive more clearly again, without having to exert a greater effort that would break your meditation.

The alertness in stage 5 came for me after stage 5 was overcome - the fog needs to be cleared first, but then you can see the mind etc. in alert state all the time, maybe also for the rest of the sit if subtle distractions don't drain you out. This is a state I found I had to achieve every sit, and that would stay after the sit but has to be maintained by regular practice.

But I guess I'm wondering if anyone has experienced that directly and if you can describe the quality of alertness you feel as a result. For instance, is it different from how I might feel after I drink a bunch of coffee?

I think the difference in alertness is like the difference between:

• Think about a pink elephant. Notice when you stop thinking about a pink elephant.
• Watch this video. Notice when the screen turns off.

The book guides you through a shift in moment-to-moment perception, and it's a lot easier to remain alert to changes in the low-level stuff, once you wrap your head around that.

Here's a big part of the practice for this stage, from below the heading "INCREASING MINDFULNESS WITH BODY SCANNING" in "Stage Five":

Shift your attention from the tip of the nose to the surface of your abdomen. Observe the sensations associated with the in-breath and the out-breath. Without losing awareness of the breath as a familiar, repeated, cyclical event, focus as much as you can on just the sensations themselves, rather than on the concepts of “expansion,” “contraction,” “skin,” “breath,” “air,” and “movement.” Notice in particular the changing qualities of these sensations as the abdomen rises and falls. Continue until your attention is stable and you can clearly recognize the changing sensations.

The book is asking you to drop abstractions like, "I'm breathing in". Instead, it's asking you to focus on small details of what's happening. And that tends to feel a lot different.

Here's more talk about the shift from the "Seventh Interlude":

Although conscious experience is dominated by perceptions derived from high-level binding moments and narrative moments of consciousness, its richness comes from individual sense-percepts and lower-level binding moments. This richness increases proportionally when the content of consciousness shifts toward more low-level information processing, and away from complex binding, abstract thinking, and story-telling. The increased richness and detail that comes with being more “fully present” is an example of such a shift.

To me, perceiving things at that level can feel:

• wavy
• prickly
• vibrational
• crazy
• soothing

So, the object of your alertness goes from:

• "Am I remembering to focus on the breath?"

to

• "Am I feeling the low-level sensations?"

When perceiving things the first way, it's difficult to remain alert. The boundaries are squishy: "Am I thinking about the breath right now?" And the updates come relatively infrequently.

When perceiving things the second way, it's easier to remain alert. The boundaries are concrete: "Do I feel the low-level sensations right now?" And the updates come multiple times per second.

You're supposed to feel as alert as you can manage. Over time applying the technique will gradually make you more alert.