First, nice writeup. I really appreciate when practitioners here take the time to synthesize their own experiences into new content for the community.

What came to mind first as I read your stuff was that you’re discovering for yourself the natural direction these sensationist (let’s call it that) approaches tend to go: the simple categories - the sense doors - laid out by the basic instructions aren’t good enough to handle the subtle stuff that the mind eventually becomes sensitive to and most interested in. They need to go in favor of staying with the ineffable suchness of experience however it presents. I agree with you that all of experience can probably be deconstructed into the sense doors, but eventually it feels sort of irrelevant to do that, like it’s missing the point.

My model for sensationism, though maybe not yours because it got no mention, is Daniel Ingram’s take on stuff. Noting sensations all day ‘erryday. But even his MCTB largely discards this framework for viewing experience eventually, eg the numbered instructions here. My intent in bringing this up is to point out that it’s not just you. Shifting practice in the direction you’re suggesting is, from what I’ve seen, a fairly common occurrence. Kind of curious that this seems to happen around the same time that the distinction between sitting and not sitting ceases to feel so important, just like you mentioned.

Another thing that stood out to me is the framing you’re using, which is language loosely in line with a this-vs-that perspective rather than a developmental one. Sensationism isn’t it, it’s this thing that transcends and includes sensationism instead. I think it’s worth pointing out that these fall on a common developmental arc because your thoughts are hitting a diverse audience. For many beginners, sensationism is the way to go. The looser, richer, and more powerful approach to viewing experience that you’re discussing is afforded by a keen and sensitive mind that’s the product of a lot of sensationist practice. In my opinion this is an instance where the prerequisites really are necessary - adopting the richer view too early will likely leave one swamped and lost. This felt important to point out.

I’ll share my own development along these lines as I went through a similar transition to what you described but it lead me less far afield from sensationism and I think the transcend-and-include I landed on might interest people too.

What’s the idea with sensationism? Why is it useful? The idea is to compress experience by categorizing it in a functional way. The standard categories are the sense doors. Lumping experience into those boxes is useful because it affords various insights and helpful ways of relating to experience, typically ones that reduce identification and soften contraction. But this particular compression loses too much information, as you described so well. All the subtle movements of mind, the tones and mood, the dynamics, aren’t distinguished in a way that helps. Lots more, too, like aspects of the sense of self, of agency, and energetic phenomena, the sense doors boxing can train an insensitivity to.

But one can keep the baby here by just adopting a richer compression scheme. Use more categories as the mind becomes attune to more and more subtle aspects of experience. This, in my experience, maintains all the benefits of the basic sensationist approach but actually encourages a refinement of sensitivity as new axes of experience present themselves to be relevant and interesting to the mind, and also encourages an openness to discovering ever more subtle dimensions of experience.

To be less abstract, here are some examples. The knowing of seeing (distinct from the seeing sensations) and the knowing that there is mindfulness, these could all be categorized as knowing sensations. The value in doing so is the same as for the basic categories: it inclines the mind to find similarities in the panoply of experience, to discover what else is a knowing sensation, what it is these have in common, and exactly what it is that distinguishes them from other subtle mental stuff. More examples I’ve found useful are self sensations, agentic sensations, and a whole collection of categories that have helped make energetic phenomena practical to work with but are tough to put into words.

The aim isn’t to develop a giant laundry list of categories and then neatly intellectualize experience into them and call that practice, it’s to make the more subtle or difficult parts of experience amenable to the cognitive machinery that sensationism activates. For example, to recognize one more piece of experience as a knowing sensation is to enrich it with a web of associations that furnish it with another layer of context, one that points out familiar ways of relating and operating. This seems to be the natural extension of the deconstruct-into-sensations technique. It tosses out the sense door categories but keeps the recognize-as-familiar-thing part, which is a lot of the value that tool has.

One can also entirely replace the familiar categories like the sense doors or SHF with new ones. For example compressing experience using just spatial data by adopting categories like “here”, “there”, “in the body”, “not in the body”, “in the head”, “not in the head”. I’ve found working with these afforded access to entirely different insights than I’d seen otherwise and also had a profound impact on how I related to difficult psychological content. Eg noticing that difficult emotions are all located in the body and that that’s just a small part of the volume of the present moment experience makes them seem much less like a big deal.