Stages of Insight in Meditative Practice Journey

The stages of insight reveal how meditation can profoundly alter perception and emotional experience over time.

### The 12 Stages of Insight Meditation: A Detailed Exploration
* 🧘 The speaker introduces the **12 stages of insight meditation**, emphasizing that practitioners may **cycle through these stages many times in their life**.
* 🌱 Stage 1: Mind and Body - characterized by a **fresh, innocent perception of sensations**, with **distortions of the body schema**.
* 🔄 Stage 2: Cause and Effect - attention shifts to perceiving the **mechanical nature of experience**, with increased noticing of **start-stop moments**.
* 🕉 Stage 3: Three Characteristics - practitioners confront **unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and no self**, often experiencing **physical discomfort and energetic phenomena**.
* 🌟 Stage 4: Arising and Passing - a peak experience marked by **intense attentional clarity** and potential glimpses of **no self**.
* 🌑 Stage 5: Dark Night (Disillusion, Fear, Misery, Disgust) - a challenging phase where **initial insights crumble**, leading to **fear, grief, and restlessness**.
* 🙏 Stage 6: Desire for Deliverance - practitioners actively seek **relief from suffering**, taking matters into their own hands.
* 🌀 Stage 7: Re-Observation - a chaotic phase where **all previous insights resurface in random ways**, often accompanied by **intense restlessness**.
* 🧘 Stage 8: Equanimity (Low and High) - a tranquil phase where **attention and awareness harmonize**, leading to a **sense of peace and stability**.
* 🌌 Stage 9: Fruition - a special moment of cessation where **all phenomena momentarily cease**, marking the **completion of a cycle**.
* 🔄 The cycle may repeat, with practitioners moving through **review stages** before starting a **new cycle**.
* 🔍 The speaker advises practitioners to pay attention to the changing nature of their practice, reminding them that "**attentional clarity is not always stable**" and encouraging self-care throughout the process.

this time I'll be running us through the stages of insight, which are 12 stages plus 304, which one go that detail the kind of phases that people may go through on their meditative path, uh, what they're likely to encounter, and each stage has uh quite distinctive phenomenology, and we can take this map with a grain of salt, might not totally align with your experience, but I think there's something to it, something interesting to it. But I I also want to caution against priming yourself too much. A little bit more about the stages of insight is you may cycle through these 12 stages many times, many, many, many times in your life. Each stage can last weeks or months, and there's a kind of big macro cycle as well as there being micro cycles, and the microcycles you may cycle through them within one meditation set. If you're sort of sensitive enough and you've been through these stages before and you know what you're looking for, you can predict them and see yourself going through them quite

quickly within one meditation SE. So, this week, I thought it would be interesting to get into, um, kind of the, yeah, the phenomenology of the different stages. With that being said, let us let us begin. So, I'm going to describe some of the qualities of the stages in terms of how your sort of perception might shift within them, how there can be different sort of physical and mental alterations, how affect might change and perception, emotional, psychological tendencies, and um, just how the quality of your attention changes when within these stages as well. Uh, as we go through these stages, it's very likely that you won't be in any one of these particular stages as I'm talking through them, but the idea here is that you can sit and listen along long and simulate, try to get a feel for how attention works and what perception is like within each stage as I describe them. And you can kind of, yeah, simulate aspects of them, you know, it's all kind of a simulation anyway. So, this is uh, yeah, maybe giving you a

taster for each day page what to expect, and then you can see it in your own practice. All right, without further ado, let's begin. So, the first stage, starting with mind and body, right? So, mind and body is the first stage, and this is really like a beginner's mind kind of stage, and beginner mind in a really good way. You know, it feels fresh and new and innocent, sort of clean. You know, you're just sitting, you're meditating, you're following the breath. The breath is the breath. It might come with a sense of feeling more alive, like you're just tuning in to your sensation, and/or your senses feel a bit more brilliant in this stage. This is a really common starting point that you do have this strong sense that there is a homunculus, you know, in your head, and you're sitting, and you're meditating, and it's just very normal and default like that. But then later in the stage, as you continue to meditate, so following your breath, this is where you can get some

funny distortions of the body schema. So, in the map of your body, it can start to feel very large or very small, or you can get these weird moments where it feels like your feet are above your head. You might feel like you're sinking into the floor. I think these are very common experiences that people start to get at the beginning of their practice. Also, as the name suggests, mind and body might be sort of a very clear distinction between, okay, there's thoughts happening, and then there's the body, and sort of inside and outside as well. And even if you're at later stages and you've seen through the delusion of that dualistic split, those models might still present themselves. It's just a very normal state, but in a good way, like fresh new baby eyes to the world. So, can you get a feel for that? Can you remember what that was like? Can you tune into [Music] that? Okay, moving on. The next stage is cause and effect. So, now in your practice, you're getting

more into the rhythm of things, and this is where you can start to see how intentions lead to movements. You know, so first there's a bodily urge to move, and then a thought, and then that directs movement. You might see more, as the name suggests, causes and effects in your experience, that there's sensations and then reactions to those at this stage as well. Your noticings per second are increasing, so it's a bit more, you're a bit more on it, uh, compared to the previous stage, but this comes with a kind of a jankiness, and you're seeing a lot more the starts and stops of different moments in time, uh, as more clear-cut kind of uh, frame rates of experience, and this gives the impression that the experience of yourself and your mind and everything is a bit more mechanical in nature. So, the previous stage was a bit flowy, now we've kind of oscillated to the left hemisphere and seeing the world as more split up and mechanical and processes.

that are reacting to each other. Yeah, there's just a bit more of a deepening into the practice as well at this [Music] point. Some of the brilliance of mind and body stages wore off, and uh, yeah, there's less of this sort of newbie glow going on. But this is you, you know, getting into the practice, and you keep going. Okay, so after cause and effect, we have the three characteristics. What are the three characteristics? They are, of course, unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and no self. And this is where those qualities of experience are showing themselves a lot more. Yeah, you can't help but see how nothing stays the same. You can't find satisfaction at this stage, and uh, yeah, the self becomes much more elusive and mysterious, and you might start to question the self. Where is the self? And you can't find it. This stage is also kind of difficult because a lot of pain can show up at this stage. Actually, you can have asymmetrical muscle spasms and aches.

of this kind, yeah, you might feel like, yeah, things are ramping up and changing, and you're, it's new territory, and you're not quite sure what's happening, but you just, you keep muscling through, you keep going through the process. This is a stage in which, yeah, people can experience weird sort of energetic phenomena, cre the body starts swaying and such like this, uh, that doesn't happen to everyone, but it's common. Uh, if you notice, yeah, jaw tension, neck pain, things like this, be a sign of you're entering into the three characteristics [Music] stage. Uh, your noticings are also speeding up again, again, again, and uh, this stage kind of mimics a little bit like the later Dark Knight stages, which we will get into, sort of giving you a taste for those, but you, it's sort of more of like physical nuisance rather than psychological bother that comes later, yeah. And so you just, you just keep going, keep concentrating through this stage, and eventually things will begin to cohere and align, and we get to what's

called a rising and passing okay, and this stage, it's either like a stage or a peak experience, is when your attentional clarity is at its best. So, the center point of attention is the most focused, the most detailed, brilliant that it's ever going to be. Within these cycles, it's common that people get a kind of eye flicker effect at this stage, and this is the peak experience. This is where things tend to line up, your attentional power is the most salient, and you clearly see and cut through whatever you're looking at. And then you might have a glimpse or a brief moment of no self or something like this. A lot of people confuse these arising and passing moments as being something more than they are, you know, an enlightenment experience or something like this, and it's not that, not yet. So, you can imagine yourself, you know, high energy, really on it, put yourself in the shoes, and you're focused, and everything comes together, and you just, wow, clearly.

see, and it can be a very happy time. It can be sort of scary leading up to it, and then things come together, and you feel like you have this clarity, but it doesn't last. And so, after the spiritual high comes the spiritual low, and now subsequently, we're going to move into the Dark Night stages. Okay, so I hope you're kind of following this and simulating along with your experience. After rising, passing, we get disillusion. It's where what you thought you had, wow, this amazing new insight, isn't going to be forever. Oh my God, I think I've cracked it, starts falling apart 'cause it doesn't last. And this can be disconcerting in a way because with the you, you realize something so new that it can create a paradigm-shifting moment in your mind. And now, what do you do with this new knowledge? You realize the world is not what you thought it was, and so you have to go through the arduous journey of recreating your world of

updating your priors phenomenologically. What does this look like? It looks like the center loses its clarity, and you're looking for something that's no longer there. You can't hold on to it. The ground starts seeping out from beneath you. You might start getting more lights and peripheral content begin to emerge. So, you lost the clarity in the focus to the center, your attention point, and peripheral content in the shadow now starts to show itself as disillusion sets in. The next stage is fear when it starts to really sink in that what you thought you had is not it. And you're confused. You're confused about the world through fear. Fear is a counter-response to disillusion where you try to regain clarity in attention, so forth. Your intentional clarity and intensity can return, but it's not the same. You don't get to go back to the un-rising and passing that peak experience. So, yeah, fear is really a counter-response, and of course, this can come with the emotional affect of a

sense of fear. Now, it doesn't have to be right. If you're sensitive enough, you can just spot these changes in your phenomenology. And, uh, in my experience, it doesn't come with some existential sense of fear as, uh, you know, subject and object relations can change throughout the path of insight. You can look at the, um, the character of your thoughts as well, going through these stages. What type of content in your thoughts is likely to arrive? Is this the stage where, yeah, childhood worries do come back? Now, as you keep trying to grasp and, uh, get a handle on, like, what is this, what can I look for, trying to focus your attention and finding that just doesn't work, the next stage comes on, which is misery, and, uh, this is a kind of grief. Grief sets in due to, uh, getting more insight into the three characteristics. My feel like, Oh my God, I was a fool for believing there were things that were permanent, that were satisfactory, that there was a self. You're again your attention.

broadens and uh the center. Center Point, the center focal point becomes more absent, and peripheral content really starts playing up much more. Yeah, it's the kind of Woe Is Me stage where you destroy and you're wallowing in your misery. Things are quite soft actually in nature, and it's quite low energy, and you need a lot of time to rest and recuperate. This stage is kind of depressive. Yeah, have to go through it. It's uh, it's not actually a Bad Thing necessarily though. This is really the process of shedding your old skin and leads to a transformation, you know, and a metamorphosis of your being, which is going in a good direction, you know. It's the three characteristics can be pinned as a negative thing, but the positive aspect here is to realize that even the negative emotions and your misery and your suffering and your pain, that's impermanent as well, and that's not satisfactory either, meaning this stuff won't ever fully overtake your being.

you'll never be fully in those things, and they're not self, they're not personal. So, that's kind of the [Music] the Light Side within the dark. As this sets in more, we move to the next stage, disgust. And disgust is a restless stage. This is where you just can't find interest in anything. And what this looks like phenomenologically is your attention is darting around; it won't stay on anything for very long. It's a very noisy state of mind. There's a lot going on. Everything is kind of irksome, bothersome. If you find you just can't concentrate, and you can't pick a meditation object, it's like try the breath, no, try Body Sensations, no, try noting, no, you know, and you just like, Oh, I don't want to do any of this. This is really a stage when how this manifests more grossly is, you know, you don't know what to do. You're kind of fed up and bored in a way like

should I watch Netflix? No. Should I read a book? No. Don't really want to go out. No. And it's like, should I eat something? Can't be bothered. There's nothing that your attention can land on that feels satisfying or entertaining or interesting. So, if you notice this kind of restlessness, it might be a stage of disgust. Now, after going through enough of these kinds of issues, at some point, you recognize that no one is coming to save you. You have to do this yourself. And this brings us to the desire for deliverance. At this stage, we just want all that know ways to go away. It's like, I'm going to really do something. I have to do something 'cause it's not settling itself. And, uh, here you get an active drive again. You get more energy again. And you're really looking over the shoulder of the present moment into the future, aspiring for something else. Like, please God, let me get out of this. I must do something. Uh, again, that might manifest in extreme ways in your life in the micro.

Cycles during your practice. It just means you're going to like, okay, let's really just commit to a practice and let's just do something. I'm just going to really, really try. Noting can be, yeah, helpful here, and it might be easier to open your eyes, note the restlessness, note all the noise, all the peripheral content. So this is the stage of seeking and striving. It might not feel like it at the time, but it is empowering because you're taking matters into your own hands as opposed to wallowing in your misery like the previous stage. You're just saying, It's up to me. I have to do this. I have to make a change. So now, as you go from that path, it's a New Journey, and you try, maybe you try many different things, and in your trying, we inevitably get into the stage of re-observation. And re-observation is a crazy stage. This is like all the madness of the pride, Dark Knight stages, revoke themselves and come at you in very random ways, and there can be a

lot of intense restlessness, and you can't sit still. A lot of repetitive thoughts and earworms, and flashy light patterns in your visual field or your mental image space. Again, you get weird shaky movements like the creepers, and energetic impulses, and these things, they're random spontaneous spasms, something like that. And yeah, it can really feel like the whole of the Dark Knight just coming together and coming at you, but you just got to keep pushing on. Yeah, if you know what's coming, you can kind of have a confidence to just keep going through it. Otherwise, this can be a kind of a manic phase, and it's hard to sit still. You might want to do more walking meditation, this or even just heavy exercise. Matter is a very good idea at this stage. Show yourself compassion and love. Try to soften things now. If you do keep going, eventually all this noise comes to cohere. The decoherence begins synchronizing with itself, and things start aligning, and

lining up, and then we get into equinity. So, we're coming out of the Dark Knight now, and I'll break equinity up into low equinity and high equinity. These are the last two stages. In low equinity, you still got some residual energy from RE observation, but there's a softness around everything, and it becomes easier to sit. This is a stage where you might have what's called formations, which are weird kind of squiggly movements in the visual field or in your body, but they're kind of soft, and they seem to be doing their thing, and it's not so surprising or scary anymore. This doesn't necessarily have to be happening. You feel like you've really settled in. It becomes much, much easier to just sit for long periods of time. It might be like an energy kind of low, but everything's tranquil. A good feature of the equinity phase is your focused attentional center and your peripheral awareness begin to

harmonize. Those two were out of sync before, and now they start harmonizing, and they feel more unified. An easy pitfall in this stage is you kind of lose motivation to do any sort of effortful practice, and you just sit because you finally got believe. Now things are nice, you want to take your hands off the wheel. There’s certainly a time and place for that, but it might be also at the beginning stages of equinity. Keep pushing on, keep doing the more doing meditations. It's also worth noting that the equinity stage or stages is very long. It's about even as it can be as long as the whole of the Dark Knight stages together. So you can be sitting in equinity for a very long time. As you keep sitting, you may begin to pass from lower equinity to high equinity, and this is when the focal attentional region and peripheral awareness start harmonizing so much that your world starts def fabricating in a big way. Things become very soft and

Airy and the 3D volumous experience of the world might start to become 2D things might if you've got if you're in a high arousal State. There could be this whitening effect if your lower Ral darkening blackening effect and if you uh keep sitting in that time. That's a very good period to do Insight practice or even just dropping the ball letting everything go. You've done or this prior work. The conditions are just right now for noticing that there is no Center No Boundaries. If you must up the motivation it's very good to do jna during this time. Jna practice and uh if you're lucky it's only a matter of time until High quity leads to a full coherence and you get a cessation or fruition which is a very special moment and which there is a there is no moment no experience no phenomenology won't go too much into that here and then you're ready to repeat the cycle uh there's a couple more stages is

like a whole review stage. Cycles, you're kind of quickly cycling through, sort of going over what you learned, and you may repeat these cycles again and again and again and again and again. So, I hope this was informative and something to look out for in your practice. Pay attention, just track, you know, that there's no terms, you know, your attention. Clarity is not going to always be stable. Your concentration will always be stable. Things change. Life comes in seasons like this. So, that's just a little bit of the phenomenology of these different stages. I hope this was interesting, and take care of yourself, okay? Bye-bye.

Qualia of the Stages of Insight | the seasons of life on the path (Theravada Buddhism)

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The stages of insight in meditation consist of 12 distinct phases, each with unique phenomenology and the potential for cycling through them multiple times.

The first stage, "mind and body," is characterized by a fresh and innocent perspective, with a strong sense of the body's presence and potential distortions in body schema.

The practice may lead to a clearer distinction between thoughts and bodily sensations, while also offering a simulation of the different stages' qualities and attention shifts.

The Stages of Intentional Movement and Awareness

Intentional movement begins with a bodily urge, leading to thoughts that direct actions, creating a more mechanical and split perception of experience.

The three characteristics of experience—unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and no self—become more prominent, causing pain and muscle tension as one questions the nature of the self.

The rising and passing stage offers peak attentional clarity and focused energy, leading to brief moments of no self, but these are often mistaken for enlightenment experiences.

The journey of spiritual growth often begins with a high point of clarity, followed by a disillusionment as the newfound insights fade.

This disillusionment leads to fear and confusion, as individuals struggle to reconcile their new understanding of the world.

Ultimately, the process can result in a sense of grief and misery, as one realizes the impermanence and unsatisfactory nature of life.

The process of emotional transformation involves a low-energy, depressive stage where one walls in misery and undergoes a shedding of the old self.

This is followed by a restless stage of disgust, characterized by an inability to concentrate and a lack of interest in anything.

Ultimately, the desire for deliverance emerges, driving a person to take action and seek change, leading to a more energetic and hopeful outlook.

The Stages of Practice and Transformation

The practice involves committing to change and taking control of one's life, moving away from a state of misery.

The stage of re-observation is chaotic, with intense restlessness and random energetic impulses, but pushing through is essential.

Equinity follows, with low and high equinity stages offering softness, tranquility, and a settled feeling, making it easier to sit for long periods and achieve focused attention.

The equinity stage follows a period of synchronization, leading to a sense of unity and motivation to relax.

This stage can be long, with a transition from lower to high equinity, causing a significant shift in perception.

High equinity may lead to a cessation or fruition, marking a special moment before cycling through the stages again.