16 Stages of Awakening

1) The importance of understanding the Dharma wisdom embedded in the Sixteen Stages of Awakening and the importance of addressing each stage one step at a time. 2) Sources include the work of Mahasi Sayadaw and Sayadaw U Jotika. 3) Sayadaw Mahasi’s explanation of Mind and Body or Nama Rupa, the first of the Sixteeen Stages. 4) Sayadaw U Jotika’s explanation of Nama Rupa. 5) Learning to distinguish between pure awareness and discursive processing of our experience in meditation. 6) Understanding how our thinking process defines our self or our ego. 7) Understanding nama rupa in terms of being in a state of flow. 8) Understanding how the self arises during times of threat, fear, anxiety or anger. 9) Understanding the relationship between conventional and absolute reality, the place of self in conventional reality and non-self in absolute reality, and how we embody both simultaneously in our lives.
December 18, 2021

1) The importance of the Sixteen Stages in the Theravadan monastic tradition. 2) Review of the first insight awakening: knowledge of mind and body. 3) Understanding the difference between awareness and thinking: how awareness is non-self and thinking imposes a sense of self on our experience. 4) The second insight awareness: understanding conditionality: the law of cause and effect or karma. 5) Understanding intention or volition and the ensuing action as cause and effect or the basis for karma. 6) Understanding that by imposing our thoughts on to the cause and effect process, we bring a sense of self into our experience. 7) The attainment of joy and bliss at the realization of nama rupa and the law of karma. 8) How understanding the power of conditioning can help free ourselves from unhappiness and suffering. 9) Understanding the burden of the self that we carry from lifetime to lifetime.
January 8, 2022

1) Definition of the Sixteen Stages of Awakening. 2) What it means to be an Arahant. How your character as a person changes. 3) The spectrum from extreme selfishness to extreme selflessness. 4) How the understanding of self and non-self can be applied to our daily life. 5) Reviewing the concept of Nama Rupa: Mind and Body and the process of cause and effect. 6) Examples of how to apply these principles in our daily lives and the power of karma to overcome suffering in our lives.
January 15, 2022

1) Moment of silence in tribute to Thich Nhat Hahn. 2) Understanding in simple terms the relationship between conventional and absolute reality and its relationship to the concepts of self and non-self. 3) Understanding what differentiates humans from animals as a sense of self consciousness derived from our larger brain size and capacity to think discursively as a result of evolution. 4) If animals don’t have a sense of self consciousness, then what do they have? Animals operate out a sense of pure conscious awareness based on instinct and learning, in human terms; a state of flow. 5) How human beings embody both levels of awareness, our base consciousness and our discursive thought process, or absolute reality and conventional reality. How our discursive thought process creates the illusion of self. 6) Understanding how karma operates at the conventional level and not the absolute level. Finding the balance between the two in our lives. Finding the middle way. 7) Learning to appreciate the two aspects of our consciousness.
January 22, 2022

1) Review of Nama Rupa or Mind and Matter, and Cause and Effect, the first two of the Sixteen Stages of Awakening. 2) Relationship to the teaching on Dependent Origination, the conceptual framework for understanding the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. 3) Recitation of the twelve steps of Dependent Origination. 4) The first stage: Ignorance: describing a normal individual in everyday life, one who is unaware of the noble path. 5) The second stage: Mental formations: thoughts, actions and volitional acts that reflect the conditioning that we experience in our lives. The development of sankharas, or conditioning formations in our lives. 6) The third stage: consciousness, or how we perceive our experience through our six sense doors. 7) The fourth stage: name and form: the application of consciousness to our experience. How our conditioning colors not only how we respond to our experience, but also the direction our lives will move into the future. 8) Understanding how the first four stages describe the development and manifestation of our personalities or our sense of self in the world. 9) The difference between humans and animals in the creation of a sense of self and the application of the law of karma. How the sense of self arises in humans.
January 30, 2022

1) Understanding Dependent Origination as the foundation for the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. 2) Review of the twelve steps of Dependent Origination: the three parts, the formation of karma, the nature of experience, and the development of suffering. 3) Review of the first phase: the formation of karma. 4) The process of experience itself: The six sense doors, Contact, and Feeling. 5) The beginning of suffering: Craving, Clinging, Becoming, Birth, Old Age and Death. 6) The crucial link between feeling and craving: experiencing feelings without craving or clinging. 7) Understanding Dependent Origination operates in our lives in terms of the life decisions we make for ourselves. 8) Living a life of balance between conventional and absolute reality.

1) Review of the sixteen stages of awakening. 2) Understanding the sixteen stages as the foundation for the four levels of enlightenment: Stream Enterer, Once Returner, Non Returner, and Arahant. 3) The three characteristics of all phenomena: impermanence, suffering, and non self. 4) Understanding thoughts as discrete phenomena with a beginning, middle, and end. 5) Understanding how observing phenomena with mindfulness causes them to diminish and disappear and understanding the result as impermanence. 6) Seeing suffering as the breaking up and destruction of thought moments, the lack of continuity and permanence and the ephemerality of experience: the lack of any solid footing for experience. 7) Seeing experience as the play of impersonal phenomena. Nothing arises of its own. The basis for the idea of non-self. 8) Seeing our suffering as rooted in the impersonal forces of karma working through us. 9) Question: Understanding negative thoughts that enter into the mind. 10) Question: How to reframe our idea of suffering as something positive and beautiful.

February 12, 2022

1) Review of the Mahasi teaching of the three characteristics. 2) Sayadaw U Jotika: Seeing the cascade of impermanent thought moments, slowing experience down through intense concentration: the illusion of continuity. 3) Understanding our experience as pure natural phenomena, not abstract concepts. 4) Seeing the qualities of impermanence, causality, and impersonality. 5) Seeing impersonality in our complete lack of control over what happens in the mind or body. 6) Comprehension by direct experience and comprehension by inference. 7) Attaining mental health by clear comprehension. 8) Understanding ourselves as psycho-physical processes. 9) Why we suffer as a result of our identification with our experience.
February 19, 2022

1) Seeing the sixteen stages as a journey through deepening stages of insight and deepening levels of meditation. 2) The organization of the sixteen stages into three major parts: discovery, the dark night of the soul, and path and fruition consciousness. 3) Summary of the third stage: impermanence, suffering, and non-self. 4) Beginning the fourth stage: the seeing of lights, the intensification of the clarity of awareness. 5) The power of noting. Feeling a sense of gratitude and fulfillment of the practice. 6) Coming into rapture and bliss in the first jhana: a description of the state of rapture. 7) How being in meditation allows us to see our experience in a way that we would not be able to in our ordinary state of mind.
February 26, 2022

1) The fourth meditative insight: Insight into Rising and Falling. Where the dynamics of the meditation process and the deepening of insight merge together. 2) Signs of developing jhana: the appearance of light, the sharpening of mindfulness, the five levels of rapture. 3) The emergence of tranquillity of mind and a sense of mental agility. 4) The twenty five beautiful mind states: the qualities of mental composure, buoyancy, pliancy, efficiency, proficiency, and rectitude of mind. 5) The resulting feeling of happiness suffusing the entire body and the arising of right energy and equanimity. 6) The corruptions of insight: the rising of attachment to our mental states, a sense of personal identification with our achievements. 7) Applying mindfulness to an understanding of the suffering in today’s world.
March 5, 2022

 1) The work Sayadaw U Jotika: Summary of third stage of insight: impermanence, suffering and non-self. 2) The understanding of no “Thing”, only process: the corresponding idea of nouns and verbs in our linguistic consciousness that ignore the basic laws of process in nature. 3) Understanding the pervasive nature of impermanence….how all things are impermanent. 4) Seeing the difference between numbers and shapes as opposed to physical sensations in the meditation process. How this relates to the question of agency in terms of how we respond to our experience. 5) The difference between change and real impermanence. 6) Feeling equanimity and balance in the meditative process. 7) Why phenomena disappear when seen with true mindfulness. 8) Coming into pure awareness, rapture and bliss and wisdom. 9) Falling into the trap of identifying with our experience. 10) The difference between concentration practice and mindfulness practice. 11) The danger of becoming attached to our experience. 12) The characteristics of clear deep mindfulness: clarity of mind and object and the danger of attachment. 13) Seeing the various stages of phenomena: first, arising; second, arising and passing away; and third, passing away. 14) How the object and the consciousness of that object both arise and pass away: the impermanence of mindfulness itself.
March 12, 2022

 1) Stage Five: Knowledge of Passing Away: the beginning of the stages of the “dark night of the soul.” 2) Understanding impermanence at its deepest level. 3) Moving through the fourth stage, the understanding of rise and fall, and getting past the corruptions of insight. 4) The transition from content to process in meditation. 5) Knowledge of dissolution or passing away. 6) The breaking up of continuity of consciousness: the analogy of time lapse photography…how we create our reality through the illusion of continuity and what we project into our experience…experience as a holographic projection. 7) Seeing reality as the simultaneous arising of the object and the awareness of the object. 8) The arising of fear and terror. The start of the “dark night of the soul.” 9) How the mind works: the analogy of a sewing machine. The possibility for a deeper understanding of who we are and our potential for freedom.
March 19, 2022

1) Introduction to the Sixteen Stages: Discovery, the Dark Night of the Soul, Path and Fruition. 2) Transitioning from the stages of discovery to the dark night of the soul: a deepening sense of apprehension about the nature of reality: the rise of fear. 3) The deconstruction of reality: the illusion of continuity. 4) Sayadaw U Jotika: characteristics of passing away. 5) The rise of disenchantment. The loss of a sense of self. 6) Seeing impermanence and impersonality in all conditioned phenomena. The rise of despair and fear. 7) Seeing impermanence itself as suffering.
March 26, 2022

1) Transitioning from the first five stages of discovery, to the next five stages of the dark night of the soul. 2) Moving from the knowledge of passing away to the knowledge of fear. 3) Stage 7: Knowledge of Misery. Seeing suffering in impermanence itself. 4) Stage 8: Knowledge of Disgust. Realizing our reaction to the truth. 5) Stage 9: Knowledge of Desire for Deliverance. 6) Stage 10: Knowledge of Re-Observation: the realization that impermanence itself is the source of suffering because of our attachment to continuity and cohesion. Persevering in the practice to overcome fear, misery, disgust, and desire for deliverance. 7) Seeing that impermanence itself is the cause of suffering because of our attachment to continuity, cohesion and stability. 8) Coming to truly accept the law of impermanence. Understanding its implications for our lives.
April 2, 2022

 1) Summary of the three phases of the sixteen stages: Discovery, the Dark Night of the Soul, and Path and Fruition Consciousness. 2) The Dark Night of the Soul: Knowledge of Fear, Disgust or Misery, Weariness, Desire for Deliverance, and Knowledge of Reconciliation. 3) Review of the stage of knowledge of Passing Away: the illusions of compactness and continuity and their relationship to absolute and conventional reality. 4) The writings of Sayadaw U Jotika: seeing the constant arising and passing away as dangerous…moving to a state of disenchantment. 5) Seeing impermanence itself as suffering, in terms of the negative mindstates, as a result of your resistance to the truth of impermanence. 6) Coming to a true acceptance of impermanence as the gateway to final awakening. 7) Question on the danger of being caught up in the dark night of the soul.
April 9, 2022

1) Review of the Sixteen Stages: transitioning from the dark night of the soul to re-observation and reconciliation and peace. 2) The notion of the spiritual process as a journey of awakening: the metaphor of a river merging with the sea. 3) Entering the Stage of Re-observation from the stages of fear and misery. 4) Reviewing the illusion of compactness and continuity. 5) Reaching the point of Re-observation where we see that impermanence itself is the source of our suffering. 6) Coming to Stage 11 which is equanimity about formations. 7) Understanding the deepening jhanic states that are occurring as we move through the stages of insight.
April 16, 2022

 1) Brief review of the sixteen stages. 2) Transitioning from the stages of the dark night of the soul to the state of complete equanimity–the writings of Sayadaw U Jotika. 3) The writings of Mahasi Sayadaw on the transition from equanimity to the beginning of path and fruition consciousness. 4) Attaining the moment of awakening or the moment of complete cessation. 5) Understanding the implications of cessation in terms of our attachment to self, suffering and fear of death.
04/23/2022

 1) Brief review of the phases of the sixteen stages. 2) Stage 12: Insight into Emergence or the arising of Cessation…the attainment of Nibbana. 3) Stage 13 to 15: Knowledge of Maturity and Path and Fruition Consciousness: The realization that Nibbana has occurred. 4) Stage 16: Knowledge of Retrospection: the full awareness in the mind of what has occurred. 5) Understanding Nibbana as attaining the Deathless. 6) Coming to a deeper understanding of the process of cessation…understanding the transition from the state of equanimity to actual cessation of consciousness.
April 30, 2022

 1) Entering the Stage of Path and Fruition from the Stage of Equanimity the writing of Sayadaw U Jotika. 2) The arising of total cessation, moving through the stages of Path and Fruition and coming to the stage of Retrospection or realization of what just happened. 3) Understanding the nature of cessation. 4) Seeing the attainment of Nibbana as the first of four stages of spiritual evolution: Stream Enterer, Once Returner, Non-Returner, and Arahant. 5) Seeing the movement through the four stages as a process of eliminating the ten fetters: doubt, avariciousness, belief in rites and rituals, envy and jealousy, false view, sensual desire, ill will and anger, pride and conceit, ignorance, and desire for existence. 6) Having a sense of compassion for ourselves in our spiritual journey through understanding the difficulty of spiritual transformation through behavioral transformation in our lives.
May 7, 2022

1) Review of the Sixteen Stages of Awakening: A) The Stages of Discovery: Insight into Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, The Three Characteristics, Rise and Fall; B) The Stages of The Dark Night of the Soul: Insight into Passing Away, Fear, Disgust and Misery, Weariness, and Desire for Deliverance; C) The Stages of Path and Fruition Consciousness: Knowledge of Reconciliation; Equanimity, Adaptation, Maturity, Path Consciousness, Fruition Consciousness and Retrospection. 2) Reviewing the process of Retrospection: the writings of Mahasi Sayadaw: Realizing that Nibbana has occurred. 3) Repetition of the cycle further to higher levels of Path and Fruition Consciousness: the higher levels of awakening to the second, third and fourth levels. 4) How going through the sixteen stages is not so much a matter of achievement as it is about how we have changed as people in our behavior: the overcoming of the ten fetters.
May 14, 2022