How to ensure that our attainments are permanent?
For example, there are people who make good progress in meditation and experience some states of samadhi, but later slip back to materiality focused life and drop meditation.
I'll be interested to hear what Jeffrey has to say about this.
A couple things come to mind. For me, self-arising bliss, joy and ecstasy began spontaneously during a period when I was trying to get out of body - doing what I called "trance work" at the time, but which was really just laying down meditation (shivasana). Once it began, it started to develop and move around my body, gradually saturating it. By the time Jeffrey introduced me to the teachings on attainment (which gave me a "home" for the phenomena), I'd accepted that this was just the way it is, that "the energy" was (and is) here to stay.
Which brings me to my second thought, that perhaps it depends on contemplative practice from past lives, as to whether or not attainment "sticks" in the early going. I don't have enough experience working with others to know how common it is for meditators to lose their attainments. I would imagine that, when they first appear, there is so much pleasure and excitement that anything less is bound to feel like loss and/or failure - and it's sad that someone would give up their practice at that point, even if understandable. I don't know if there's a magic trick for making it stick - my sense is that putting the time in on the cushion is what does it, and that there are no guarantees around the timing.
