Have You Attained Stream Entry?
How can you tell whether this stage of awakening has actually taken place?
A Meditator’s Question:
I’m wondering about “stream entry,” which I understand to be the first stage of awakening according to the classical map of The Four Stages of Enlightenment. As I understand it, stream entry involves a fundamental shift in conscious experience that cannot be reversed.
Have you “entered the stream,” and if so, how did you come to recognize it? What helped you understand that this shift had actually taken place?
Oded’s Answer:
In my own case of awakening, the decisive shift happened after several years of intensive practice, and a little over a year of working closely with The Mind Illuminated. The year that preceded the awakening was marked by frequent entries into deep jhāna - Stages Eight and Nine of The Elephant Path - accompanied by a gradual maturation of The Five Insights: impermanence, emptiness, dukkha, interdependence, and non-self.
Then, on the last evening of an 8-day retreat, suffering came to an end. It was a quiet, peaceful awakening, very similar to waking up in the morning after a long, deep sleep.
There was a clear before-and-after: the mind no longer related to experience through the same contraction around “me” and “mine.” The illusion of the separate self was seen through directly and completely, and the relief that followed did not fade in the way previous peak meditative states used to fade.
Ever since that day, there has been a continuous experience of liberation from suffering that’s not subject to passing away. Seven years later, and it’s still rock solid, withstanding everything the universe sent my way: gain and loss, pain and pleasure, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. It works as advertised.
The shift is irreversible, because after we see through an illusion, we can no longer believe it’s true - like discovering the mechanism behind an elaborate magic trick. Once we get it, the magician can no longer fool us in quite the same way.
As you can see, I’m speaking about “awakening” instead of “stream-entry,” since I find the classic “four stages of enlightenment” to be overly arbitrary, to the degree that it may even be counterproductive. My preference is to see the process as growing degrees of freedom, ever-expanding as we continue on the path. That growth can be examined by looking directly at The Ten Fetters, without grouping them into “stream-enterer,” “once-returner,” “non-returner,” and “arahant.”
The Ten Fetters are: identity view, doubt, attachment to rites and rituals, sensory desire, ill-will, material desire, immaterial desire, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. Some can be severed completely, some only partially, and some might still cause unnecessary suffering, justifying continued practice and the diligent application of Right Effort.
The process is finite, but not necessarily as linear as some Enlightenment maps might suggest.
With Metta,
Oded
