Mitra Study book: "Seeing that Frees"

For 1/25 study group

Outline of chapter not intended to be a summary, rather the structure with my highlights. 

Each chapter heading is a letter.

Sections:

I. Chapter Outline

II. Questions/topics for discussion

III. Resource for further investigation

Chapter 4: The Cultivation of Insight 

I. Chapter Outline

A. What is ‘Insight’? (p. 29)

1. First, insight  is not a certain experience that we need to attain. Extraordinary experiences may, to be sure, be important at times but they are not what actually frees. Nor is insight simply ‘being mindful and watching the show’, without any effect on, or input into, the fabrication or dissolution of the experience of dukkha. 

2. Second, defining insight in this way admits a wide range to its manifestation. It can be present in any situation, or in regard to any experience or phenomenon: gross or extremely subtle, easy to see or more profound, ‘worldly’ or more transcendent. It may manifest as the understanding of a personal pattern that has been problematic. Or it may involve the recognition of something more universal – the fact of impermanence impressing itself more compellingly on the mind and heart, for instance, or, indeed, a realization at some level of the emptiness of something. Always the essential characteristic, though, is that it contributes to lessening dukkha.

3. Third, however, it is important to stress that, as we are defining it here, only what is actually perceivable to a practitioner qualifies as an insight for that practitioner. I may, for example, feel anxious when I check my bank balance and see that there is no money at all in my account. But refusing to believe the bank statement and simply choosing to believe instead that I have a million dollars in the account would not in itself constitute an insight according to our definition here, even if it did have the effect of reducing my suffering. More generally, any introduction of a belief not based on perception, or similarly, any introduction of notions of unobservable entities would also, strictly speaking, be excluded from this particular definition of insight.

4. Fourth, and related to this last point: Rather than being based upon faith in the experience of another, or upon blind beliefs – even ‘Buddhist’ beliefs – about how things are, insight, as we are defining it, is based primarily on personal experience of what decreases dukkha. When there is insight, the seeing melts dukkha; and that release of dukkha we can feel and know for ourselves.

B. Insight and the Four Noble Truths (p. 30)

1. Repeatedly the Buddha stressed that his entire Teaching addresses essentially only the question of dukkha and the ending of dukkha.

2.  In effect then, the primary and unifying principle overarching the whole of the Dharma is the relieving of suffering and dis-ease

In taking the dissolving of dukkha as our primary investigation, reality is gradually revealed. On the path the Buddha discovered, then, insight, discernment of truth, and freedom from dukkha all unfold together.

In taking the dissolving of dukkha as our primary investigation, reality is gradually revealed. On the path the Buddha discovered, then, insight, discernment of truth, and freedom from dukkha all unfold together. 

As practitioners, we are of course interested in both the kinds of insight that contribute to future freedom and those that bring freedom in the moment too. For our purposes, though, we are particularly interested in the latter.

C. Modes of Insight and ‘Ways of Looking’ (p. 32)

1. 'Aha' moment: "experience of an insight arising spontaneously as you were being mindfully present with something. You ‘have’ or ‘get’ an insight. There is an ‘aha!’ moment: suddenly or gradually, you see something, you realize something, and it makes a difference to the dukkha. Such an insight arose as a result of mindfulness, or of qualities like calm or investigation.

2. another mode in which we can also work at times, where insight itself is more a starting point, a cause, more itself the method. In this second mode of insight practice we more deliberately attempt to sustain a ‘way of looking’ at experience – a view of, or relationship with, experience – that is already informed by a certain insight or other. Rather than ‘getting’ (or hoping to ‘get’) an insight, we are using an insight. This does not mean merely to ‘think something insightful’, for instance that “all things are impermanent” – thinking may or may not be involved – but actually to shift into a mode where we are looking through the lens of a particular insight.

This second mode of approach supports an organic deepening of insight. Repeating, cultivating, and prolonging a way of looking that embodies a certain level of some initial insight should lead naturally to more profound insights emerging passively from the space and foundational ground of that sustained way of looking.

D. The Inevitability of Fabrication (p. 33)

Being and Doing are closely related, perhaps functionally the same. 

False assumptions: 

1. That there actually is an objective reality that we can and should ‘be with’. 

2. That anything other than the awareness ‘simply knowing’ or innocently, naturally ‘receiving’ this ‘reality’ is somehow a laboured and artificially constructed state. 

3. That since a state of ‘being’ is thus assumed to be a state of ‘non-doing’ and so to involve no effort, self will not be constructed there. This is in contrast to states more obviously involving intention, which are assumed to construct self

Most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking. That is to say, it is empty. Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’. And as we shall also see, in states of ‘just being’ which we might imagine are devoid of self, a subtle self is actually being constructed anyway. This fact too needs to be recognized.

Now crucially, in any moment we are either engaging a way of looking at experience, self, and the world, that is creating, perpetuating, or compounding dukkha to some degree, or we are looking in a way that, to some degree, frees. 

E. Insight into Voidness (p. 35)

Sustaining experimentation with certain ways of looking is one approach that can readily begin to reveal the voidness of appearances. And then, in time, it is also possible to practise viewing phenomena through lenses which actually include some level of understanding of emptiness. Different depths of understanding of emptiness, we will find, can be translated into different ways of looking. Although it will be better understood as the various practices are unfolded, it is perhaps important to make something clear about such an approach right now. What is being suggested here involves much more than an intellectual assertion of the relativity of all perception, and a concomitant inability to uncover any more ultimate truth of things. For in the course of such practice we will become aware of more than just which ways of looking lead to dukkha and which to freedom. We also become aware of what exactly is included in any way of looking. And we can learn gradually to withdraw more and more of the elements in our looking that contribute to fabrication. Meditation thus becomes a journey of experimenting: with freeing ways of looking; and in particular with ways of looking that withdraw, undermine, or dissolve various elements in the mind and heart that contribute to fabrication. On this journey something amazing is revealed. For as well as learning to drain the dukkha from situations and things, we are also learning to dismantle fabrication. In the process, we are moving towards opening to what is beyond conventional perception, what is unfabricated; and then there is the possibility of opening even beyond that to the fundamental truth of all things – their emptiness.

F. Seeing the Emptiness of Things: A Range of Means (p. 36)

1. A gradually deepening inquiry into fabrication – of the self and of all experience

developing a certain kind of understanding of all experience, including meditation experiences. We begin by noticing the range of variability in our perceptions of self and the world. Sometimes I perceive myself or some thing one way, and at other times quite differently.

2. Realizing the impossibility of inherent existence

engaging in a thorough search for the self or for the essence of any thing. Such a search in practice considers and exhausts all the possible places or ways that it might exist, and so reveals that it simply cannot exist in the way that we perceive and feel it to

G. Intuitions and intimations of emptiness (p. 38)

For it is very possible at times that something in the heart and mind – we could call it intuitive wisdom – feels the intimations of a different sense of things, intuits somehow and to some degree the truth of emptiness. Sometimes the perspective opens up dramatically and very forcefully; at other times much more faintly – perhaps we feel a subtle quality that infuses appearances with a suggestion, a whisper, of their voidness, or even of a kind of silence, a transcendent and mystical dimension, that seems to lie ‘beyond’ those very appearances, yet that somehow ‘shines’ timelessly through them, changing our relationship with them, rendering them diaphanous, less substantial. Such intuitions may arise either suddenly or gradually, and they can come in all sorts of ways

It is vital to trust these openings and intimations. However, they are invariably incomplete and need the support of the practices in the other two approaches to refine, deepen, widen, and consolidate the insights they bring. Indeed it seems the flame of intuitive sensibility here is often sparked and fanned by the more systematic approaches, which it can in turn then feed back into and ignite further. Through practice we then start to see that, rather than being separate, all three approaches actually overlap, inform, and mutually reinforce each other, and that used in conjunction they help to fill out the whole understanding.

II. Questions/topics for discussion

How can we "feel and know for ourselves" that we are experiencing a release from dukkha? From the section "What is 'Insight'", 

From page 29:

When there is insight, the seeing melts dukkha; and that release of dukkha we can feel and know for ourselves.

Discuss this statement 

from page 31: "insight, discernment of truth, and freedom from dukkha all unfold together." 

Could the freeing that comes with insight also feel destabilizing? What are some ways to anchor, to find grounding if needed on this journey?

From page 36:

Meditation thus becomes a journey of experimenting: with freeing ways of looking; and in particular with ways of looking that withdraw, undermine, or dissolve various elements in the mind and heart that contribute to fabrication.

Will "intuitive wisdom" develop from this practice? How can we know when we are intuiting wisely or fabricating? 

From page 38

at times that something in the heart and mind – we could call it intuitive wisdom – feels the intimations of a different sense of things, intuits somehow and to some degree the truth of emptiness.

III. Resource for further investigation