u/PrestigiousWafer4179

Hi all, I've been in the stage 4/5/6 plateau for a while and have gained more understanding regarding the landscape of my own mind. I practice 1-1.5 hours everyday.

What has become clear to me is that the road to exclusive attention involves dropping of effort. The mind has to feel safe and has to stay with the breath on its own more and more without active forcing.

So a general and deep sense of relaxation has to present so that the mind feels safe which allows it to stay with and enjoy the breath. Kind of like how if you have no pending work, no other worries, you can enjoy video games without anything weighing on your mind.

Assuming what I wrote above is correct, then whatever has been said regarding introspective awareness in stage 4 has to be re-interpreted because it is repeatedly emphasized that attention shouldn't be developed at the cost of awareness. Here's a direct quote from the book:

> Your new goal is to monitor the mind and detect distractions more efficiently, so that you don't interrupt attention. You achieve this by developing an intentional, vigilant, and continuous introspective awareness that alerts you to gross distractions while you remain focused on the breath.

When I was first practicing stage 4, reading the words like "intentional", "vigilant", and "continuous", led me into being in a very alert state where I would be paranoid about subtle distractions creeping in. There was a background strain constantly present while my attention would stay on the breath, and it felt like i was practicing correctly, I was "vigilant", "continuously" monitoring what was going on with awareness, and my attention was becoming continuous.

My current understanding after experimenting with relaxation and low effort sits is that introspective awareness is only supposed to be a neutral/chill information delivery mechanism. It should feel neutral and relaxed. The correction procedure for letting go of distractions which requires a little more effort, has to only occasionally fire up when required. Another way to say it is that your default mode has to be of "trusting your mind" and just continuously receiving information regarding what is going on--there is no need for constant "vigilance" or to "stand guard like a sentry" which is another very misleading analogy used in stage 4 if what I'm saying is correct.

You just intend to keep receiving information and when you detect something going wrong you gently correct it and go back to the default trusting mode.

Please let me know if my understanding is correct or not.

Hi folks, I'm practicing at stage 5. I can stably hold attention over the breath and I don't lose introspective awareness. I don't get sleepy, but dullness still arises which I think is stable subtle dullness--extrospective awareness fades and sensations become dimmer. Subjectively, there is a feeling of sleepiness, but I'm able to sustain attention. I don't sink. That's why my interpretation is that this is stable subtle dullness and not gross dullness.

My confusion however is that I observe the relationship of distraction and dullness differently than what TMI states. According to the stage 4 description, once gross distractions are overcome, the stability of mind will lead to dullness. The implication is that dullness and distractions are inversely related. However, in my practice, what I see is that because mind has a tendency to get dull, it starts to fill in the non-perceiving mind moments with distractions, so according to me, dullness causes distractions. As long as my extrospective awareness is strong and awareness and attention are occupied with sensations of the body, distractions don't come up. Am I missing something?

To summarize according to TMI, distractions are only a product of restlessness, but according to me distractions can also be a product of dullness.

EDIT: Some more related questions: I don't usually experience distractions like how TMI describes them--as restlessness and the mind jumping around to them. For me it usually works like "Attention on the breath awareness wide -> interest in breath and sensations lost -> awareness starts fading -> increase in dullness -> mind starts playing scenes from a movie / some random song comes to mind etc etc" If someone could shed light on this that'd be helpful too. TMI seems to recognize dullness and distractions as inverses while I don't experience it like that.