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Insight Meditation

Healthy-best.blogspot.com- What is Insight Meditation? - Insight Meditation as such something that we call insight or Vipassana Meditation really began in the late 19th early 20th century in Burma with a particular a monk named Lady Sayada, and while Lady Saya was a traditional monk.

He also was a traditional monk who was interested in innovating the Dharma in his time, in a post-colonial or a colonial atmosphere in order to sort of responding to the colonial colonialization at the time which was introducing new religions in particular Christianity into Burma and basically to respond to those innovations of that is to say to the colonial innovations.

He wanted to respond with his own with an understanding of Dharma in a new way or at least uncovering some old ways that it had been understood in the past that were not current. So at the time basically the notion that the awakening was possible, had sort of decayed within Burma and I believe within much of Southeast Asia.

This is one of the points that Eric Braun makes in that book, and so what you have is this notion that the attaining awakening was something that was extremely difficult, and something it only could be attained over let's say multiple lifetimes.

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And as a result, any particular monastic was not expected to attain awakening or even to attempt to attain awakening. What they were supposed to do was rather more mundane, and that went off course doubly triply ten times four for laypeople.

Laypeople it was not even considered that they would be attaining awakening and my supposition here although I don't know that it's quite said this way in the book my supposition would be. That in that kind of context where awakening really wasn't thought of as particularly possible.

I would imagine that Christian proselytes would have an easier time at gaining adherence, because Christianity in encounter distinction, was a religion that was promising a kind of salvation within this very life.

That is to say all you needed to do was to accept certain propositions, believe certain things, assent to certain claims, about Jesus about Christianity and you were guaranteed heavenly rebirth ort hat is to say you were guaranteed to attain heaven after you died, and in distinction to that at the time Buddhism the salvation that Buddhism promised at least insofar as we consider to salvation at least let's put it this way for a lay audience and for perhaps a large monastic audience as well they would have thought of Awakening as a kind of salvation.

But it was salvation it was very very distant and so I would think that the competition here was pretty strong. So basically the Lady Saya da was trying to figure out by looking at the ancient texts by his knowledge of the ancient texts basically how to make the achievement of awakening within a Buddhist context.

As efficient as possible in a way is there a way to understand awakening such that lay people might even attain to it and of course we know that for the vast majority of laypeople they don't have the time to put into very intensive meditation on a daily basis.

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And for this reason, one of the innovations, that Lady Saya introduced was to leave Jhana to one side now Jhana is a form of meditation of deep absorb active meditation which I've discussed in Prior videos.

But it takes a number of hours of meditation every day in order to achieve it at least for the vast majority of people, it's not the sort of thing that on a laypersons kind of a working daily routine they're going to be able to do very easily. So instead of focusing on a deep Jhana which is one part of traditional meditation.

Would Lady side out did was instead was to focus on what we might term mindfulness meditation in a sort of a broad general sense? That is to say, focusing on the psyche Putana sutra and the sutras on mindfulness on focusing on the mindfulness of the body on the four different foundations of mindfulness. And this at least for many lay people would have been an easier way to proceed.

Because mindfulness meditation is the sort of thing that you can do in short periods of time every day you can do mindfulness meditation let's say successfully insofar as we can understand the success here with five minutes a day with two minutes a day just sitting down and being aware of the body and the breath and being aware of the state of the mind we can do it moment to moment we can do it while we're working we can do it while we're walking.

It's something we can integrate into daily life whereas Jon are we really can't, but in particular lady Siyad I wanted to focus on the mindfulness refrain. Now the refrain is a certain passage within the Suta on the foundations of mindfulness, that repeats throughout the Suta. And basically, it's a refrain which I've discussed in my prior videos on the foundations of mindfulness.

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That we are to focus on the arising and passing of each of the states that we're supposed to contemplate within a mindfulness context, we're supposed to be aware of the fact that they are impermanent we were supposed to make ourselves aware of this in a moment by moment way in a direct way not simply to be aware of their impermanence intellectually.

But to become aware of it in a visceral level, and this insight into change this insight into the impermanence of these states also allows us to have insight into their unsatisfactory nature, because anything that is impermanent is not itself completely satisfactory because in so far even insofar as it is satisfactory it decays and goes away so it's not something we can rely upon.

So to that extent, it's not reliable. Also we're to become aware in the same way, that these states are non-self that they're not ourselves and not who we are because again they will rise and pass, whoever we are, whomever we would like to be is something that we think of as being permanent it has something that sort of persists. But these states we can see in we can see directly arise and pass so they cannot be who we are.

And these three aspects the aspects into insight into the three aspects of reality that reality is changeable, the reality is in some sense unsatisfactory, and the reality is non-self. These three aspects this is what we have to have insight into so when we call that meditation

Insight Meditation or Vipassana

Which is the Pali word for insight or translated as insight what we're saying is that this is a meditation that involves insight into these three aspects of reality. And Lady Saya daf thought of this kind of meditation this form of meditation as most efficient, because within the early texts awakening is attained upon the sort of understanding that is not a conceptual understanding but a visceral understanding of these three aspects of reality its insight into this the non-self nature of reality, insight into dukkha which is the second of these the fact that reality is is not satisfactory insight into change.

That then produces awakening because as we're aware of reality in this in the sense, we tend to decide a phi with it we tend to relax around it we tend not to cling to it,

It's also worth saying, that although a ladies himself was innovating in a sense that he was leaving Jhana largely to one side, and focusing on lay practice. That is to say he was teaching to lay, people, he was teaching in the vernacular language which was unusual in that day it's not as though this was not done in the early Suta's he was intimately aware with of the sutras in the Pali Canon, which was his background and in fact we do find in the Pali Canon remarks that that Awakening is possible or seems to be possible without the achievement of at least all of the Jhanas it's not entirely clear.

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But it's not it's not clear that what I mean it's clear that one can achieve awakening without achieving complete mastery of the Jhanas, because there are people who do it in the early texts, it's also clear in the early texts that the Buddha was not opposed to laypeople, attaining awakening or at least trying to attain awakening.

There was nothing he was not opposed to that in any way so and certainly laypeople did reach high levels of achievement, so it's when we say that Lady Saya was introducing innovations, he was introducing them as innovations in his day, and in the Buddhist religion of his day, but if we look at the Blessed history what he was trying to do at least in his lights and I think correctly.

Was to sort of unearth earlier practices which could be more useful in a modern context, so in any event and this his attempt is to produce in us a mind of non clinging by insight into these aspects of reality, and by doing that he's trying to produce the third noble truth or make us aware of the third noble truth that extinction that Awakening is possible through the decay or extinction of clinging.

Now often I see Bush man's question that I referred to at the beginning of the was how not only what is in sight or what does the opossum in meditation but how does it differ from calming meditation.

On the first and the first hand they're not entirely different and I think it would be a mistake to think of insight as sort of versus calm, or insight is different, because we need some level of calm, some level of relaxation, in order to pursue this kind of or any kind of meditation really.

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That's one of the reasons why focusing on the breath is so important in all kinds of Buddhist meditation really, because by focusing on the breath we at least begin to calm down the body, and we begin to calm down the body was able to focus in more intently on whatever it is we're trying to do.

So, for example, it certainly does help, to begin with, breathing meditation if we're going to achieve Jhana, but that takes much longer that's a much more deep focused kind of enterprise, but it is also a kind of calming meditation if we're gonna do normal mindfulness meditation where we're just focusing on the different aspects of the mind or the body.

And that also tends to begin with calming, because if we're not calm with them if the mind is bouncing around too much, we're not able to focus well enough on what the body or the mind is producing for us all we can do is focus on the blooming buzzing confusion.

Which is enough for us if that's what the mind is producing then at least we're aware of that, but it's still we can achieve much more if we're able to calm.

So to that extent there isn't really a hard and fast distinction between common meditation and Vipassana, they're related that you have to do both you have to do calming if you're going to do the possum, but I think what-what distinguishes Vipassana meditation from simply calming meditation is that, of course, we can get to a common meditation, where we get to sort of a blissed-out state, where we're relaxed, and were calm, and we're not stressed. but we're just right hanging out there we're not doing anything.

And that isn't really what we're trying to do in traditional Buddhist meditation. What we want to do is then once we get to that level to use that calm to a greater end. And in particular, in Vipassana, there is an I would say a key cognitive aspect here, insight into these three aspects of experience is something that is at least partly cognitive.

I mean we have to be aware of the arising and passing those are cognitive, those are intellectual in at least to a degree intellectual States, because we're seeing things were naming things in a sense as arising and passing, even if we don't explicitly use those words in our mind, or at least fitting them into a kind of a cognitive role.

Now that, of course, is not to say that it's merely cognitive, because otherwise, we could do mind we could do the pasta meditation simply by picking up a book of Buddhist Philosophy, or Buddhist Theory, and reading about it.

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And that clearly would not be sufficient so it's more than simply cognitive but it's at least partly cognitive, and in that way as we use this cognition to understand the world correctly from within an early Buddhist context to the extent that we're able to then change our emotional attachment with the world in other words were able to see it as non-self, as non-satisfactory as changeable, and were able to relax around it which is which is an emotional kind of reaction.

Then we're able to achieve I would say a more skillful state of relation into the world, so if you're interested in pursuing of the piscina or Insight Meditation, there, of course, many many resources around the web, or there are inside of a Poisson a-- groups within many cities around the world.

If you see a Buddhist meditation group in yours in your town or see your a local town the calls itself of the Pisano or insight, that's the kind of thing that at least at some level they're pursuing, but if you want to pursue this on your own without access to those kinds of groups a one thing to do is to do a kind of mindfulness meditation, but to you know try to remember to be aware of the arising and passing of States to try to be aware of the unsatisfactory nature of these states because of their arising and passing because of their impermanence to try to be aware of the selfless nature of states that these states are not who you are that they're not you that they are to some degree a and objectives part of the furniture of the world and so there's something that you can see yourself as distinct from.

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