Time: 45 minutes

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, half lotus.

Experience: I began with my focus on my breath and soon felt a pressure between my eyes. I shifted my attention to the pressure and observed it intensify and grow. I observed some low level physical pleasure in my arms, hands, and torso - the pleasure seemed to pulse in a non-linear way. This was followed by some (again low-level) strobe effects behind my eye-lids. My awareness seemed to expand somewhat from a narrow-focus to a wider one and I began to tune into a sense of mental calm and equanimity. From here, the rest of the meditation was spent examining my sensory experience of breathing from this place of equanimity. Like my last session, this one was characterized from beginning to end by a sort of unfocused concentration. The object was constantly slipping away when I tried to examine it. This lead to feelings of doubt, disgust, and frutration about my meditation efforts. I attempted to turn my awareness on the arising and passing of these feelings themselves, but without much success.

Observations: Based on my experiences so far and a few conversations with yogis on DhO I suspect I'm in the Dark Night. The difficulty concentrating and general feelings of doubt and misery while meditating seem to bare this out. Ingram's MCTB recommends pushing-on through by simply "being with" these phenomina as they are, so that's the plan; although I'll be the first to admit this seems like a tall order and I'm more than a little unsure how to begin.