Comments on “The Mind Illuminated, a journal: Day 9”

Thanks, glad you’re enjoying them!

Ah, that’s interesting. I’m not sure if it was clear that I was intending to differentiate between paths and results. I’ve altered the text to make that stand out. It now reads:

“This is a fundamental difference between Sutric and non-Sutric approaches to meditation. Experientially in Vajrayana, you train presence of awareness with whatever arises…so there can be no distraction – it’s not a concept in the referential framework of the path or the result.”

Then later I’ve made it more clear that distraction is considered an obstacle, which one overcomes, on the path in the TMI system.

I think this is a significant difference between the paths, experientially. When I’ve spoken with practitioners approaching Vajrayana meditation from an already well-established concentrative experience, the idea of not holding a concept of distraction has been difficult to convey. I find it funny that, in reverse direction, I had difficulty cultivating the development of a meditative referential framework that includes distraction. I needed to have the experience first in order to fully ‘get’ it.

You commented elsewhere that it’s like my experience foreshadowed parts of the book I hadn’t yet read, and that was true in several stages. At the same time, I think the method sometimes gave rise to the experience that the system describes and works with. I have long suspected that generally the worldview and language of a path conditions the experience that the method addresses, in a kind of positive feedback loop between path and practice, and that there are advantages and disadvantages to the specifics of how different systems do this.