FWIW, there a loads of lay practitioners doing way in excess of an hour a day, all over the world. Especially in ngakpa traditions - where householders often meditate even more than monks who get saddled with monastery work.
Although, that tradition emphasises the rôle of Lama.
Conversation
Yeah. Cutting Machinery is structure as it is (three ten minute rounds, emphasis on emotional clearing work) to stabilize practitioners.
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Yeah. I think it’s important that people recognise that contemplative systems valorises different values, which shifts the structure of the whole thing.
If you optimise for stability, it’s clear that you’ll get a different process, and different flavours of dissonance.
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So in hindsight, I was making an ass of myself here. Sorry, Vinay.
On the other hand, I didn't find Cutting Machinery stabilizing at all.
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While I was doing just an hour a day, but steadily for, I started shedding and reconstituting parts of personality - seemingly overnight.
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- along with some pretty intense awakening experiences and shifts in consciousness on one hand, bizarre sensory stuff on the other.
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I literally stopped meditating completely for several months and the experiences just kept on coming. Was told by more qualified ppl to go-
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- through it rather than wait it out, as, quote "this won't stop until it's done", hence I figured I'd try to bulldoze through it now, alone
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that doesn't mean reacting like that to instruction was exactly justified, but I'm sort of at a loss as to what to do here.
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I stop meditating entirely, I'll keep experiencing shifts - but with no meditative practice to stabilize them. I do an hour a day, I guess-
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-they start coming faster again. I wanted to short-circuit the process.
That might be a terrible idea, but that was the reasoning.