Culadasa June 2018 Patreon Q&A

Timestamps: 0:00 - TMI I was mostly about Samatha, will you be writing a book about insight too? What resources and methods do you recommend for a meditator to develop their insight? 4:44 - Explain the purification process from the perspective of a stage 4 practitioner. I still feel unsure about whether I’m having a purification or not. (Recently experienced extreme tension without a release.) 13:06 - Is there a way to encourage/help along purification since they’re so important? 14:35 - Attention Deficit Disorder seems to affect my ability to maintain mindfulness throughout daily life to allow enough time to practice and my rate of progress and ability to maintain stable attention. 19:31 - I have question as to what extent your lifestyle off the cushion affects your progress and meditation. Is it possible that certain life situations can stop your meditation progress. For example, if the person is in a long-distance, long-term relationship that is hard on him or her. Secondly, and this might sound like a strange question, for a heterosexual male, do you think his lifestyle choices regarding his sexual behavior affect his meditation progress (e.g. sex with an abundance of women vs someone not pursuing intimacy.) 29:19 - What do you believe happens when we die. I’m interested in your thoughts about Buddhism and death as traditionally Buddhism is about ceasing the cycle of rebirth. What do you make of the Buddha’s emphasis on the ceasing the cycle of rebirth? You’ve spoken about accessing past life memories, which implies memories are stored somewhere? 47:41 - When you have this experience of recalling past life memories, how do you know it’s not just a manifestation like a dream or a daydream or even a lucid dream that’s happening to your waking consciousness? 51:50 - In the Jataka tales, it does look like there was some kind of linear progression of this mind stream. What can you say about that? (editor’s note: not entirely clear what is being asked here but it sounds like it’s more about past lives and whether there is a continuum or if parts of a personality are being dispersed) 59:32 - A question re: abortion. If we know that a child is going to have serious defects, yet if we are following the precepts I guess we wouldn’t abort. We would have to know when a mind enters that body, because maybe before that abortion would be not killing the being? 1:04:53 - I’m in stage 5-6 an am going on my first retreat. My goal for this retreat is to obtain jhanas and take them back to my day-to-day practice. So what would be the most effective way to achieve this? 1:08:06 - For the sake of curiosity and inspiration, what is beyond fourth path? 1:14:32 - I’ve heard you say that the attention given to the default mode network in recent discussions of the neuroscience of meditation is a bit overblown. And culture-specific. Could you say more about this? Buy Culadasa's books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/culadasa Follow Culadasa on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Culadasa.John.Yates Much more at: culadasa.com/