Debugging Doubt (pt 2)

dropping the fetter of doubt

“Doubt is the only thing holding you back from enlightenment,” Frank Yang said to me in October 2023 on a jhana retreat, and he was right. It took me until a month or so ago to realize that, and maybe that realization would’ve been faster had I started the direct pointing / fetters approach sooner.

My learning journey with the approach of direct pointing to drop the fetters began when I came across this unfiltered guy on meditation twitter named Michael. He claimed to have hit Streamentry, this magical trait that I aped into seeking after reading The Mind Illuminated and scrolling r/Streamentry (without really understanding all the available practice traditions out there). And he did so after a week of strolling around Barcelona doing some exercises he curated in a couple page google doc. I’d been wanting Streamentry, Enlightenment, or the real goods that these meditation folks advertise since I started meditating in 2018.

“It is possible that the wall of knowing is so thick that simple things are not visible.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

If this guy can do it in a week, wtf have I been doing this whole time? I’ve had similar feelings come up while helping teach the jhanas. Reliable access to some of the lower jhanas took me a lot of trial and error, and during my first jhana retreat I went from reliable access to j2, to experiencing 1-5 (j5 briefly). But some people who I help guide on these retreats just go from much less meditation experience to j6 and beyond in a week! So there was this fear that Michael and these jhanas-are-ez folks have some unique psychology that I missed out on.

There was also a lot of skepticism about his claims. It’s some random, loud guy on the internet. Maybe he’s just scripting all these people into local peaks in the landscape. But I still wanted to find out, and I thought that at least someone needed to verify if he’s legit. Even if he wasn’t, then that would be something valuable for the community. I was also tempted to try the methods he was advertising because maybe just as Jhourney is to the jhanas, the direct pointing path could be to enlightenment: a movement or set of practices that demonstrate access to fancy meditation states/traits can be much easier than we think.

“Those lucky enough to know that there is a way out, a mysterious thing known as enlightenment, often spent years fruitlessly seeking a truth that is simple, real, and immediate—right in front of their eyes.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

I had a couple first calls with Michael, one where we just chatted about terraforming the Sahara and another where he actually guided me through some of the exercises in the google doc. A lot of it is about separating direct experience from some extra, imaginary layer of experience. This never really connected with me. All the exercises seemed to be obvious and have zero standout effects. I was tracing the outline of different objects, noting thousands of times per day (I had a little counter ring from Amazon) for a few days, but wasn’t seeing my visual field become luminous or take on extra levels of juicy saturation like I’d seen in random internet reports. I was labeling my experience into thoughts, sights, sounds, sensations, and my metacognitive awareness was more continuous, but this all seemed pretty standard noting effects that I’ve seen before. What was new here?

After about a week of these haphazard experiments, I stopped doing the practices for a couple weeks or more (I forget). Some conditioning came up and I was busy with work. By conditioning, I mean some patterns of beating myself up mentally for no good reason, avoiding those feelings of shame by eating lots of sub-par pizza, then repeating that pattern over the course of several days before fading back into a more neutral baseline. It was a lot less intense than in the past, but it’s not like all bad habits are completely, immediately cleaved from experience doing a smattering of jhanas and emotional work. Another week or so passed, and then Michael posted a chart of the trajectory of people’s experience that he’s been guiding. And I did not want to end up as one of the folks who didn’t Succeed, so I reached out again to set up some more calls.

This next round I was told to focus on the section about separating direct experience from the imagined layer, so I spent an hour and a half staring at different fruits, then imagining their mental simulation. Smelling lemons, apples, and cherry tomatoes, then trying to imagine the smell. And doing the same thing with all the senses I could. Same thing with the auditory field, I tapped on my desk with my fingers, then imagined the sound continuing without tapping. Once again, no fireworks. My thoughts at the time:

“So this first section I’m feeling very know-it-all about. Like obviously I can tell the difference between mental images and imagery in my visual field. I can obviously tell the difference between any experience experienced from its actual sense door than a simulated version of that. We'll see if I spot anything different. I should set some intentions around being open to experiencing or learning things I don't know. I'm open to that idea. Maybe there's something hiding in a blindspot that I really haven't noticed before. Maybe I'll learn something super simple, but very fundamental in this first exercise.”

A lot changed when I read Gateless Gatecrashers, a book with several conversations between people seeking to drop the first three fetters and a guide who helps point out how to do that. Essentially, a book of examples of what Michael was offering to do for me. At first, I just noticed some emotional reactions to a few quotes. Sadness in response to this one:

“So now look at the real possibility that there is no “you” in real life. That all is happening by itself, without a manager. Look inside and tell me what feeling comes up; do you recognise fear, resistance, frustration, what is it?” - Gateless Gatecrashers

Again sadness arose while reading more of the conversations. So much of the seeker’s pattern of delusion, frustration, and doubt matched my own. As I looked in experience for a Self in the different ways the guide prompted, there was some amusement about the fact that there's this idea of a Me doing all these things when there's only every senses, thoughts, imagery and the rest arising without a Me.

“There is no thinking about and no doing, just seeing and the me-ness makes no sense.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

There’s nothing new here intellectually, and a younger Owen might’ve been dismissive, but then I hadn’t truly looked in direct experience to verify those intellectual beliefs about no-self and build confidence around the undeniable evidence.

“There is nothing wrong with you. The “you” that you think you are, you are not. What you are is nameless. You could call it “life itself” or “existence” or “presence” or “awareness” or nothing. You are already free. It is only a matter of seeing through the thought-illusion that makes you think you are in bondage. The bondage is not real. It is just a story. And you are not a story.” - Gateless Gatecrashers

These quotes I’m sharing from the book would’ve sounded trite to me in the past, but once I spent some time looking in my direct experience, they seemed to hold more weight, they felt like accurate descriptions of the real-time transformation of my understanding. And it’s not really a transformation. I think I’ve been here for a while, but doubt has been clouding and discrediting my experience.

Maybe there was some point of no return that would’ve been clearer in the past if doubt wasn’t ratcheted up to the highest gear at that time. I’ve had experiences that pattern match with cessation or j7 during my previous breath-based concentration/insight practice, but the habit of strongly discounting the value of my experiences was so strong back then, and the expectations for what these kinds of realization are was so fantastical, that now I don’t really know what happened or where the stream began.

On a subsequent call with Michael, he confirmed my experience. Yeah, there’s no heavenly trumpets to announce Streamentry, just this recognition that there’s only experience, no special doer. I said, “That’s so dumb” a few times. I mean, it’s dumb that they call it Streamentry and that it is made to be so special. It is and it isn’t elusive and special. I felt a relief and a mostly-amused, slight annoyance about this joke. I riffed on how I’d built it up to be such a huge thing without actually investigating those assumptions. And yes, life is so much better than before I started meditating, and if I flipped the switch between my experience as a 21 year old to what my baseline well-being is now, then that 21 year old would probably freak out and say it’s better than a lot of common hedonistic loops.

Now it’s clear a lot of suffering can be contained in wanting experience to be grand, wanting Streamentry, wanting to be saved. Doing Michael’s curation of Liberation Unleashed and Simply the Seen techniques, and reading Gateless Gatecrashers, regardless if it helps you drop the first three fetters, helps to really uncover blindspots. And maybe this kind of cobbled-together direct path tradition is just overlooked, dismissed because it isn’t considered as a possibility because our Self-made contracts to suffer don’t allow for easier paths.

As Jhourney is to the jhanas, direct pointing is to dropping fetters. The “light” jhanas are life changing. Yes, maybe the hard jhanas are way better for specific uses, but there’s lower hanging fruit that tastes absolutely delectable, so let’s fucking eat it. Michael’s Streamentry may not hit as hard as the type where you dualistic concentration your way into popping a cessation, just as the TWIM jhanas don’t produce as gnarly phenomenological descriptions of j1 as the Brasington techniques, but the fetters approach may still take you all the way, just like the “light” jhanas.

Currently, I still get caught up in deprecated code, there isn’t always a metacognitive awareness of the fact that there’s no Me (or a feeling of agencylessness), but it doesn’t really feel like there’s ever a Me, just sometimes there’s more contracted experience. Doubt seems to be mostly gone, or I haven’t felt doubt in a while. Sometimes I notice a speech pattern where I tag caveats to what I’m saying, which originates from previously-held doubts. I’m happy to admit if I’m wrong about anything I’ve said here, but I also feel confident in my diagnosis. Later I’ll write about my experience doing the exercises to drop the fourth and fifth fetters. Thanks for reading so far and I wish you a chill Sunday.

“Liberation has been oversold. It does not guarantee immediate and passive release from suffering, or freedom from thoughts, or love and peace forever. That’s a caricature. The reality is different—but it is genuine. Finding that reality for yourself brings clarity—and opens a new path to developing a way of life that is smooth, kind, humble, and overflowing with joy.” - Gateless Gatecrashers