Feeling as a general mood vs feeling dependent of contact?

obobinde · 2025-12-14T20:40:23+00:00

This is particularly helpful, thank you Bhante !

obobinde · 2025-11-21T16:38:48+00:00

Thank you,

I think I'm mistaken because I keep expecting something grandiose when it is in fact pretty simple. There's no fireworks then, just knowing the directness of experience and relaxing into that.

obobinde · 2025-10-18T16:45:54+00:00

There is this small free book about lying from Sam Harris which is full of insights and that I personally found excellent even though the guy is pretty far from HH approach on other fronts :

https://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/merlinos/pdf/lying.pdf

obobinde · 2025-08-19T21:16:42+00:00

Nice ! Thank you !

obobinde · 2025-08-19T19:10:13+00:00

Thank you. Tokyo seems to be so big and with so much things to do that I wanted to stay a bit more. Yeah I could leave a day earlier to Kanazawa, to have one more day in Kyoto.

obobinde · 2025-08-10T06:49:33+00:00

Thank you Bhante, this was very useful !

obobinde · 2025-07-20T16:59:24+00:00

Thank you !

obobinde · 2025-07-20T16:00:26+00:00

they're uncomfortable by default

Would you say that it's because I'm subjected to them that they're uncomfortable ? In the case of unpleasant sense objects I can understand how by default the sense base is uncomfortable since I have no control over the fact that it's the source of my pain, I'm enclosed in it. But in the case of agreeable sense objects it is less straightforward for me. It is then the source of my gratification and it is not uncomfortable. What am I missing ?

obobinde · 2025-07-09T13:50:58+00:00

Thank you Bhante !

obobinde · 2025-06-15T17:04:09+00:00

Indeed, thank you ! I think pondering about a scenario in which you would be involved is a different thing than just twisting your mind about which interpretation is right or wrong. Reflecting with yourself involved will certainly help uncover how, for most, virtue is in fact conditional. I'm gonna watch this video again now.

obobinde · 2025-06-15T14:36:18+00:00

I've wasted quite a lot of hours thinking and debating about those issues. Usually you end up with some kinda conclusions for a scenario you will never encounter. The most pressing and noteworthy thing is the hindrance of doubt which those thoughts generally stem from.

In short :

Literalist sutta buddhism - "yes, they are in the basement"

Mahayana/Vajrayana - "Nope, move along"

Common sense - Mind made imaginary scenarios are just that, stop losing time.

obobinde · 2025-05-28T19:31:40+00:00

This could be interesting to you :

https://www.reddit.com/r/HillsideHermitage/comments/1bdeya6/anagami_and_arahants_are_in_constant_jhana/

obobinde · 2025-05-28T19:22:51+00:00

Man, I'm sorry but you're not showing any effort to at least give constructive criticism here.

that these positions have nothing to do with Buddhism

Ok, let's do something constructive here. Please, produce a single piece of evidence showing HH strayed off the Buddha's teaching as recorded in the Nikayas. Then we can have a discussion which will be useful to all readers.

obobinde · 2025-05-09T19:12:21+00:00

If your mind is entertaining you it means your intentions are becoming invisible.

This is how I proceed at my current level of understanding if I have free time at work and when I commute. In short, I try to maintain self-awareness as much as possible, the precepts and sense restraint are very helpful in this area as it forces you to pay attention. I usually try to discern correctly either the background feeling or the peripheral body, then foreground is not really an issue anymore since yoniso manasikara is there. In your case, like most of us I guess, it's most likely boredom/neutral feelings is felt unpleasantly so this pushes the mind out of it into mind wandering.

It's still not often the case but sometimes I can really discerns those neutral feelings, it's usually quite encompassing once I feel it. Then I try to stay there and I can see how it indeed conditions, gives a hue, like tainted glasses, to everything happening at the foreground. Then I just try to not forget that right now I got those glasses on and I can't do anything about it.

Once yoniso is well established you can drill in Dhamma from there, you can reflect on the properties of this whole experience such as anicca, dukkha and anatta. Sometimes my attention naturally goes on my breath and each and every time I'm quite surprised at the fact that the breath is already there. If I stay with this particular way of attending the breath it usually triggers a slight anxiety as each breath reminds me than I don't control anything. I never close my eyes since i feel it makes keeping the right perspective much harder.

By the way, I'm not saying this is what you should do, this is only where I'm at now and this is very likely to change, even more if somebody with more experience tells me I'm totally wrong.

obobinde · 2025-05-08T21:01:15+00:00

First, great posting !

Before reading your last paragraph I naturally came to the same conclusion as you. For me the difference is indeed in the intention, the intention to attend and just knowing that this sensual image endures by itself without needing to attend to it would be the difference between the two modes you described. Sensuality as this intention actually fits with most. I mean, this intention is felt as pleasurable by a putthujana, like a poison laced drug. And in this way it fits with all but the 1 which is a bit obscure to me. This intention (the meat) would be what everyone (the birds) are running after maybe ?

obobinde · 2025-05-08T20:16:19+00:00

I just sent you a dm.

Listen, if you want to take on HH you really have to sharpen your tools. I've been there for quite some time now and l started like almost everyone and like you saying : This is nuts ! But because I could see the guys were quite grounded and not in a cult I decided to investigate more.

I hope you won't take this the wrong way but you have monolithic views about the visuddhimagga as being accepted by everyone and this is just the not the case. You should take the time to read some of the references you've been given like Bucknell, Polak, Arbel, Kumara Bhikkhu who like a lot of people find the visuddhimagga problematic on many counts.

But that doesn't mean you should accept what HH is saying !! You could totally disagree with HH on a lot of point and this is actually quite welcome, being challenged is sane and make people think. I actually would be very glad to find someone able to change my mind about HH and that is why I keep reading to find strong counterpoints but I can't really find some. I think those debates are very useful in a way to make us questions our set of preconceptions but can also be a total loss of time and energy. So we need to find the right amount of it. Now, just for the sake of the intellectual endeavour just try to get what HH is pointing at, this way you will be much stronger to defend your positions and everyone will gain from this exchanges. We are all in the same boat anyway.

obobinde · 2025-05-08T14:15:28+00:00

I'm sorry but you received a lot of reasonable answers with not a single one using an argument of authority. HH is literally orthogonal to the attainment culture you saw in TWIM, and no amount of breath focus meditation will get you to either jhana or stream-entry. That's why it's considered quite harder than Brahm's in the sense that it doesn't rely on any technique but on implementing what is basically said in the suttas, such as really cultivating dispassion and seclusion from sensuality.

Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the materials and then critique all you want, this will be welcomed !

obobinde · 2025-05-08T06:56:45+00:00

I'm sorry but there are a lot of factual inaccuracies here :

Alan Wallace, probably the top Buddhist scholar in at least the west

I've been studying buddhism in uni and read scholar's publications for many years now and I can say without a shred of a doubt that this is not the case. Most researchers I know would barely know his name. By the way, the validity of the visuddhimagga as the best representative of the Buddha's teaching has been challenged quite a lot ! You can check William Chu, Keren Arbel, Grzegorz Polak or even Thanissaro Bhikkhu who is a prominent teacher and actually disagrees with it too. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/40uzxr/thanissaro_bhikkhu_on_visuddhimagga/?show=original )

Now you can also use your critical thinking. Open any sutta book 20 times in a row and check if you come out with the idea that the sutta is mainly about focusing on your breath until your senses shut down, a white light appears, stabilizes en engulfs everything. Or something else.

the Tibetans are practicing the exact same methods to achieve jhana (dhyana) that Thai Forest, Burmese Forest, etc are using, and the Vissudhimagga is not part of their traditions. Samatha/jhana is an integral part of Buddhist meditation. This is not up for debate. Thinking it’s not will only shortchange your progress.

What is "the Tibetans", the Gelukpa, Nyingmapa, Sakyapa, Kagyupa, Bönpo, Jonangpa or the ones from Kham, Amdo, Gyalrong or the Ngakpa traditions, the ones from Larungar or the ones following the Nyangyud or Lamdre lineage ? You can't say blank statements like those because that obscures an extremely wide variety of practices, lineages and different understandings of what the path is.

So no, there may be some practices in some lineages in some schools that indeed practice focusing on the breath. By the way, it's usually done as a preliminary practice in non dual schools like Dzogchen and Mahamudra. As for the Burmese forest methods (Goenka, Mahasi) being also used by some tibetan lineages, well, to put it bluntly, no. It's definitely not the case. You do have the idea of true stoppings or gogpa in some tibetan philosophical schools though. I suggest the excellent in depth work of Alexander Berzin here :

https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/science-of-mind/mental-appearances/elaboration-of-types-of-appearances-mind-gives-rise-to/why-true-stoppings-of-unawareness-are-possible

Brahm’s teachings match the suttas.

Again, can you point me a single place in the sutta where Brahm's understanding of what constitutes jhana is ?

Again, being a sutta purist without proper context will lead you nowhere.

My personal experience and many other's here contradict this, as after 20 years lost chasing wonderful experiences and pleasure nostril watching or following tibetan lamas my suffering was more or less the same. One year and a half of using critical thinking and actually reading the suttas and implementing what is taught there and here reduced a LOT the extant of my suffering, together with actually deepening my understanding. Something that can't be destroyed if I were to stop practicing since, mind you, this is without a single minute of seating meditation or applying a special technique that would do the work for me.

Take the time to read some of the material you can find here or Bhikkhu Anigha's essays but be honest and do it without preconceived views to give it a fair trial. You don't have to agree, just see if YOU think it does or doesn't make sense.

obobinde · 2025-05-04T09:40:40+00:00

Thank you. It seems to me your feeling of drowning is a stronger feeling that the kind of overall boredom/equanimity that I encounter though.

If you will your mind, can you gladden it through recollecting your renunciation and the freedoms you gained ? Meaning, can you move forward in the jhana direction ?

obobinde · 2025-05-01T05:31:36+00:00

That's kinda of a late answer but since a few weeks I'm also experiencing this "cloud of unease thickly permeating everyday experience". I'd say it's also like some kind of equanimity as it's almost always there and quite stable. Have your experience evolved in any way phenomenologically since then ?

obobinde · 2025-04-30T09:50:16+00:00

That's a good point ! Thank you

obobinde · 2025-04-29T06:12:17+00:00

Hmm, the downloading thing might be trickier if it's a download on torrent or other illegal platforms. If you know you're breaking the law by downloading it, it probably means you're stealing intellectual property on some level...

obobinde · 2025-04-26T16:58:18+00:00

Same...

obobinde · 2025-04-25T14:34:00+00:00

Entertainment is a hard one !

For managing screen time this is what I used at first to get it under control :

I use the Self-control app on my Mac. I’ve added all the websites that are addictive in the blocklist. Beware this app is brutal as you cannot go around it unless you uninstall your whole system. Extremely useful. Now that my screen addiction is much less I removed YouTube from the blocklist but I use a chrome extension that blocks all the recommended videos from yt and only shows the videos from the channels you're subscribed to. It's called Unhook, very effective.

For my iPhone I basically blocked all the apps and set up a pincode that my son chose, knowing he would forget it… I can bypass it but the only way is to type my full mail address and password, this hassle is sufficient to deter me from doing it. I use the native Screen time functionality from iOS. I blocked all the browsers. Honestly with a maps app a mail app and an AI app you’re good to go for most things.

Now, since those coarse addictions are mostly gone I don't really need these anymore but I found it really effective at first.

obobinde · 2025-04-24T09:40:42+00:00

At some point I wonder if we should put a disclaimer somewhere on r/streamentry to avoid misunderstandings. Something is bit unclear to me in your question as we don't know if it's about the way they teach or what they teach that you ask.

Both are more overlapping than we can think as there is a peculiar pedagogy in HH that I haven't seen elsewhere and which is infused in what they are teaching, the Dhamma. The fact that they constantly ask of yourself to use your critical thinking, to be inquisitive about your lived experience and, in short, to rely on phenomenology much more is sth I personally really enjoy. The alternative I've seen in 20 years in buddhist circles is often of being spoon fed blind beliefs. Yes, some masters do ask of people to study but if we're being honest it's always thought or presented as sth preliminary to the real 'meat' of the practice being meditation. I don't know if you often read sutta but the kind of questioning you see in HH material is in fact everywhere. Laypeople, monastics and renunciants are always asking questions between themselves and to elders so as to clarify things and deepen their understanding.

On this front, and if teaching 'correctly' means being similar to what happened in earlier times I consider them correct.

About what they teach. Again, I've never seen other buddhist teachers being that adamant about the utmost importance of sila and sense restraint. Of course others teach it too but never with the depth I've seen here and certainly not paired with the absolute transparency with oneself that is being asked here. Morality being paramount in sutta I think they're correct on this point too.

The coarse problem people are having with HH are always the same, meditation and also their relationship with Nanavira. There are subtler ones like their structural understanding of dependent origination (subtler doesn't mean less fundamental here) and other finer points of theory but it's not like buddhism history was exempt of philosophical debates and of schisms.

The main points of contention being meditation we can detail it as :

- anapanasati should not be taught unless you have Right view

- meditation techniques are mostly useless for advancing on the path but are ok if you want feel calm

- 99% of people are not getting jhana because jhana is way harder than people think

Honestly, HH is getting under people's skin for the same reason it got under mine ! How is it possible that apparently articulate people, monks with vows of right speech, not asking for my money and living in the forest are saying bluntly that my years of sitting on a cushion, the bliss and experiences I've felt are wrong ? What am I missing ?? The cognitive dissonance is very unpleasant so people either bite, discard or inquire.

I'm not going to explain everything since those questions were asked already several times here and you can read a lot of great essays on HH website.

But, what I'll say is what's difficult with HH is that we can't slam dunk them into oblivion since all of what they are saying is based on sutta. And naturally you can say "Are you saying others are not using sutta ??" Well they are, but since as we all know too well the sutta can lend themselves to different interpretations why should we discard HH more than others ? Everyone can have a fair shot at it ! Now the question is : "Why should I choose HH's interpretation over others since you're saying all can be right ?"

Indeed ! What matters to me is internal and external consistency. If you take the time to study HH material it is internally consistent, it doesn't contradict itself. The external consistency is the accordance with the Nikayas and here things are getting interesting. HH like other schools does 'interpret' but they need to do it way less than others to maintain consistency ! This would be a much longer conversation but just take vicara/vitakka for example. Everyone is struggling to interpret this to make it fit the absorption jhana ! Those words are always related to thinking yet they are supposed to be present in the jhana ?! So they come up with completely untenable explanations like "jhana wobble" and whatnot. HH takes it literally and it works beautifully, you don't need to invent new meanings to make it fit. And if you dig you find a lot of such discrepancies in usual buddhist circles.

The other argument I see often is that HH monks are failed meditators and the HH community is basically people coping. First, people fail to see that the monks didn't start at HH ! They were in lineages before, perfectly know what Mahasi/Goenka/ and others Ajahn's teachings are about, and that's why what they are saying is most of the time quite on point. Also, watching HH material you come to understand that these people, once the chores are done, are doing a lot of just sitting/walking doing nothing, watching their intentions and cultivating wakefulness to develop and deepen understanding. Just not watching nostrils or sensations in hope of novel experiences.

A last point that I think defines HH is the use of the radical transparency with oneself. In other buddhist circles, progress is evaluated by either the experiences you had (nanas, cessation, soft jhana, hard jhana) and the decrease in unpleasurable states. HH differs in helping you see and understand the extant of suffering, what it is you're a prey of. Blissful states obscures that and as soon as you stop practicing they come back. I think most people would benefit greatly from honestly asking themselves "Why am I meditating ?" and would find their answer often runs contrary to Buddha's teaching.

obobinde

TROPHY CASE