Dullness arises as a natural progression of over-relaxing & over-calming.
Dullness refers to a meditative state of mind that lowers the ability of your awareness to experience your meditation object. At extreme levels, the ability to be aware of everything will also dull.
Gross and subtle dullness is a right-of-passage for all meditators and a sign of the development of samadhi (unification of attention).
Gross Dullness may arise in Meditation 06 as you begin to be aware of the whole of each breath. If not addressed, gross dullness will establish at Meditation 07: sensations within each breath.
The cause of dullness is simple: you have become very good at relaxing; too good actually.
In the process of relaxing and calming restlessness, it is easy to over-calm the ability of our mind to be aware of any objects.
The trick in Cultivation 03 is to increase the clarity of your awareness as you relax, not decrease it (develop clear comprehension).
At this stage of mindfulness of breathing, dullness becomes a regular visitor to the meditator as a right-of-passage that signifies finding the balance between over-effort and too little effort, leading to the understanding of the middle way or balance.
Everyday dullness arises when energy levels become too low to support the functions of your mind, creating the conditions for the clarity of your awareness to lower.
Below is a list of everyday dullness and antidotes:
Sleepiness:
Over-eating:
Stress Breathing:
Lapse of Mindfulness:
Mental Aversion:
These are everyday causes of dullness. As an insight meditator, it is important that you can recognise and separate them for meditative dullness.
As strange as it may sound, Gross Dullness occurs during mindfulness of breathing before Subtle Dullness and is a sign of progression in the development of samatha (calm).
Gross Dullness occurs because of the complete over-calming of your mind's ability to be aware of any experience, including itself.
Subtle dullness still has clarity of awareness but not clarity of your meditation object.
......................................................
08) Gross Dullness: Complete collapse of clarity of awareness.
Gross Dullness refers to the experience of an extreme lowering of the ability of awareness to be aware of any experience.
This results in a loss of clarity in both your meditation object and your mind.
Gross dullness is a sign of progress in meditation and reflects the deepening of a meditator's samadhi (unification of attention).
It occurs as the meditator develops physical and mental relaxation, and they inadvertently over-calm the ability for awareness to know an experience.
Gross dullness is a right-of-passage for the meditator and refines the meditator's skill in relaxing while maintaining clear comprehension of their present experience.
As you learn to balance the effort, the Enlightenment Factor of Right Effort will mature, and you will no longer experience gross dullness.
......................................................
A Trio of Hindrances.
Gross Dullness has two accomplices: Doubt & Gross Restlessness.
09) Doubt: Losing trust in meditation practice, technique, or teacher.
Doubt refers to the rapid flickering of your mind between attraction, aversion, and confusion that occurs when your mind fears not getting it right because everything feels out of control.
When doubt is present, the meditator finds fault in themselves, their current teacher, and their meditation technique, causing them to cycle between meditation teachers and techniques to escape discomfort.
Doubt becomes strong in correlation with gross dullness & gross restlessness. As gross dullness develops, these three come as a trio.
Doubt is weakened by daily gratitude reflection and by regular contact with a community of fellow meditators and/or teacher.
Doubt is a regular visitor in insight meditation until the meditator has reached the level of Stream Entry (Sotapanna).
......................................................
Balancing Gross Dullness:
Gross Dullness is one of the main barriers to deep calm & tranquility and is an object of insight as soon as it arises.
During long periods of intensive retreat, my experience of gross dullness was so strong that I got whiplash from my head jerking forward.
At one stage in Myanmar, I had to put a cushion on the floor in front of me because dullness would be so strong that my body collapsed, and I would hit my head on the floor.
I later observed that this occurred because of the collapse in my mind of the signal that told my body to keep sitting upright.
11) Subtle Dullness: Loss of clarity of meditation object (sensations).
Subtle dullness refers to the experience of the disappearance of your ability to perceive sensations within your breathing.
It is a sign that your attention has become stable, but you have lost contact with the experience of your meditation object.
You may experience a clear, tranquil state that can be mistaken for deep samadhi yet stop progressing in calm and insight.
Recognising Gross & Subtle Dullness.
Balancing Subtle Dullness:
To remove subtle dullness, pay closer attention to sensations in your body & breathing while increasing sensitivity to the pleasure of letting go.
If this does not work, increase the objects of your awareness by experiencing breathing methodically in as many parts as possible.
Gross Dullness can be addressed temporarily by strengthening mindfulness and arousing energy or permanently by training your mind to recognise and incline towards increased clarity of awareness, through insight into its elemental nature and conditions for arising.
If you find yourself in Gross Dullness during your meditation and cannot get out of it, you can cycle through points of touch to arouse energy.
Slowly cycle your awareness through different points of touch within your body. Be aware of one point at a time.
The important part is to take your time being aware of the experience of each point of touch. Mentally 'feeling' the sensate quality within it.
Touch is experienced as pressure, hardness, softness, warmth, etc.
As you experience the sensate quality within a touch point, silently say: "touching, touching" to direct your attention to it.
The first label brings your awareness to the point of touch, and the second label brings your awareness to the experience of the point of touch.
In this way, you apply your attention and sustain it by rubbing awareness within the experience before moving on to the next touch point.
Cultivating momentum of mindfulness and arouses mental energy.
...........................................................
Meditation Instruction:
SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
Step 1: Bring awareness first to your whole body and silently say: “sitting, sitting”, while mentally feeling your whole body.
Step 2: Next, bring awareness to a point of touch such as your buttocks on the floor, and silently say: “touching, touching” while mentally 'feeling' that point of touch.
Step 3: Cycle slowly between these two points of touch: "sitting, sitting" (feel the body), "touching, touching" (feel your buttocks touch), spending time being aware as clearly as you can of each.
Step 4: Gradually add points of touch to this cycle.
Example:
In this way, you will generate alertness.
Once sleepiness has faded, return to your original meditation object or continue with your touch point meditation, depending on the outcome you are after.
During mindfulness of breathing, gross dullness occurs while being aware of the whole length of each breath in Meditation 06, and aware of sensations within your breathing in Meditation 07.
When gross dullness occurs, you will experience an extreme lowering of your ability to be aware of any experience.
Your mind will feel dull, heavy, sluggish, and drift between floaty dream-like states, unable to rest or experience anything clearly.
When at an extreme, gross dullness transforms into what is known as Sinking Mind, where you will start to get head and body collapses each time you completely lose awareness.
...........................................................
Your first step.
Even though it is difficult to be aware of anything in gross dullness. It is possible to be clearly aware of how unclearly aware you are.
This stream of remembering will strengthen your mindfulness.
Your second step:
Investigate Gross Dullness.
Insight into gross dullness develops by pulling it apart.
Can you experience dullness, tightness, heaviness, floatiness, movement, warmth, coolness, stickiness, etc.?
If Gross Dullness is a regular visitor in your meditation, develop insight into the conditions that create it.
From the beginning of each meditation, take your time on each Experiential Marker.
Experiential Markers:
Gross Dullness occurs:
When developing each Experiential Marker, take your time and develop a clear awareness of two things:
To enhance your mind's perception of elemental qualities, use simple silent mental labels such as warm, cool, soft, hard, tense, heavy, vibrating, etc.
To enhance the connection of your mind to the pleasure of relaxation, enjoy and smile at it.
Take your time. Rest in the pleasure that is available in each stage of relaxation. Feeling its growing ease, contentment.
Gently smile into this pleasure with your eyes and allow it to enter your mind.
Find the pleasure in sitting in meditation in your body, in your breathing, and in letting go within your mind.
Balance the calming of relaxing/letting go with increased comprehension of what you are experiencing now.
This will decondition the tendency of your mind to associate relaxation with a lowering of awareness.
Copyright © 2023 Meditation in The Shire - Stephen Procter - All rights reserved.
Using Material? Please link back to this website and give credit to author Stephen Procter.