Sota vs Samatha

Sota: Stream Entry Guide Sota is a practice companion for meditators serious about reaching stream entry — the first fruition on the Theravāda path. Built around the Mahāsi Sayadaw progress of insight map, Sota supports your daily sits with intelligent guidance, honest tracking, and tools drawn from the pragmatic dharma tradition. What's inside: - Sit Timer — Anapana, Metta, and Kasina concentration sessions with voice guidance and a singing bowl bell - Stage Map — Navigate the nanas from access concentration to stream entry, with plain-language descriptions of each territory - Resolve — Set and renew your determination (adhiṭṭhāna) for stream entry - Practice Tracker — Log sessions, track streaks, and monitor 7 and 30-day momentum - Retreat Planner — Structured 5, 7, and 10-day self-retreat templates with day-by-day schedules - AI Guide — A companion trained on the pragmatic dharma tradition, available between sits (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral, or Open Router). Your data never leaves your device. The AI Guide requires a API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral, or Open Router). Sota is for practitioners who are done dabbling.

Samatha is a quiet instrument for practitioners of The Mind Illuminated (TMI), the meditation manual by Culadasa (John Yates, PhD). It is not a content library. It is the tool you reach for twice a day: a sit timer with a hand-tuned singing bowl, an honest check-in, and the traditional ten-stage painting — alive, interactive, and centered on where YOU are. THE SIT • Wall-clock timer (survives locks and calls), gentle start and end bowls • Mindfulness bells: halfway, every 5 minutes, or random — the honest startle test for subtle dullness • Six-point preparation and four-step transition, straight from the practice • Your last note to yourself, shown exactly when it helps: before you sit • Live Activity on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island • A sit can never be lost — killed app, reboot: everything is restored THE HONEST STAGE LOGIC • After each sit, check what you actually experienced — each observation votes • A sit's lived stage is the median of its votes; in doubt, the lower one • The app NEVER promotes you. After three consecutive diagnosed sits above your stage, it points you to the book's mastery criteria — you confirm, honestly • Going back a stage after a pause is one tap. That's not failure, that's practice THE PATH • The traditional ten-stage elephant painting, fully interactive • Every stage: what to practice, what to avoid, the signs you're there, obstacles and graduated antidotes, mastery criteria • A safety card for destabilizing experiences — because a serious tool carries the book's guardrails, not just its techniques YOUR JOURNAL • Every sit, monthly sections, full CSV export anytime • Automatic, private iCloud backup — your data never touches our servers (there are none) Free. No ads. No account. No tracking. Independent app, not affiliated with Dharma Treasure or the authors. Original text throughout.