Diving Head First into Meditation

If this Path is about falling into Grace, I’ve already been doing that my entire life. While diving straight into the horizontal in full speed, I was already practicing jumping into the groundless ground.

The reason why the progress in my path was so rapid, and was able to dive straight to the Source/Emptiness in the vertical axis by disregarding and transcending shadow work and all the Forms in between in the horizontal axis is because I’ve been doing the latter through various endeavors to fully express myself, like creating art, bodybuilding, pick up, and playing music without filters before I knew anything about spirituality.

Ultimately the Y and the X axis are the same thing because form is emptiness, and Source is appearance.

But for the people that aren't such nut jobs, they need to take baby step by wearing various parachutes to climb up the cliff slowly before taking the leap of faith.

Neither method is better than the other. It’s just what it is. This Path has an intelligence of its own. All you have to do is stay authentic and allow It to unfold.

This is why I relate to Tom Cruise.

Q: How did you deal with Fears / Dreadfulness on your path?

A: The term Fear Barrier is actually very new in my vocabulary (written on June 2023). I didn’t conceptualize it as a Fear Barrier during my path.

I was just viewing it as sensations that were extra prickly or whatever.

Of course, there’s a disadvantage to going it my way.

But I can also see the advantage of being so totally ignorant about this stuff that I didn’t pile up on more conditioning about the “Fear Barrier” or “Letting go technique”. And many people can get stuck generating more thoughts and stories about their Fears.

I see it for what it was, just more sensory experiences and just kept bulldozing through Fear Barriers.

Q: When did Letting Go / Surrendering work come into your Path?

I actually didn’t know what Letting Go meant during the Path. My journey was 95% going hard with concentration work until I hit the Big Bang.

But in a way, I was also always letting go. My friend once told me: “Hey Frank, even when you’re inauthentic, you’re still authentic.”

I guess what they meant was that the way I lived my life didn’t have a lot of the self-critical, self-judgment stuff that a lot of people hit on the way.

I just meditated for 2 hours then went about doing Frank Yang stuff. Whether that’s the crazy stuff like Mirin’ gains video where I worked out almost nude in public or just crazy art shit. For the character, there were lots of contractions. But there weren’t any contraction about contractions for me.

I didn’t resist the resistance much.

Even during the really intense Dark Night of the Soul moments, I always had this faith in the background that everything was unfolding the way it was supposed to be.

In that way, I was letting go without knowing much about the technique.

Q: How does Vipassana merge with Letting Go?

When you do the Do Nothing meditation, in a way you’re still doing Vipassana. Because solidity will come up very strongly when you let go of everything.

And when you keep letting go into that solidity, then there’s almost an automatic investigation happening at the 3 characteristics of the sensations: not-self (seeing the solidity as not part of me or mine), impermanence (seeing the solidity change and disappear), unsatisfactoriness (the inability to accept things for it is). Of course, if you don’t know about Vipassana, you may not be able to conceptualize what’s happening.