Used correctly, together with the other practices listed in this recipe, it’s a rocket ship to the moon. Quite the opposite, it’s a very sophisticated technology of enlightenment. So, it’s by no means a low-grade or substandard practice. It also has the feature of being effective all the way to arahatship (the Fourth of the Four Paths of Enlightenment as described in Theravada Buddhism). So it’s the ultimate safety net and 1st gear practice. The genius of vipassana is that there is never a time when it can’t be done. Note your experience, preferably aloud, with one-word labels until everything that arises in the mind and body is seen in the moment of its arising. If, for whatever reason, self-enquiry isn’t feasible, downshift to:ġst gear: Balance investigation (vipassana) and concentration (samatha). Who knows about this experience? If the answer is “I”, then ask “Who am I?” This is called self-enquiry. If you are distracted and unable to rest in buddha mind, downshift to:Ģnd gear: Ask “Who am I?” until awareness turns back on itself. This is known as recognizing buddha nature or dwelling in buddha mind. So, without further ado, here is the 3-Speed Transmission: (First I’ll present the thumbnail version, then elaborate on each theme.)ģrd gear: If you can just let it be, understanding in your heart and in your bones that the happiness and peace you seek are your own true nature, then let it be. In that case, it’s helpful to have 2nd and 1st gear so that when things get tough or confusing we can still do a practice that is accessible and that doesn’t leave us feeling overwhelmed. For many of us, though, the conditioning to live in our thoughts is very strong.
For you, the happiness that does not depend on conditions may become second nature as soon as it is pointed out to you. The most gifted among you may find that you can just stay in third gear nearly all the time. All of the scaffolding is only a temporary device to help you find the confidence to abandon the building project entirely and find that you already are the happiness you seek. Later, as we shall see, the understanding we are most interested in is not related to knowledge in the usual sense. This association of each new bit of understanding with what has gone before helps you to retain knowledge better because anything you learn within a larger context is hard to forget or confuse. If learning is carefully scaffolded, there will always be something to hang each new bit of learning on as it comes in. It’s like building a scaffold around a house you can climb up the scaffold to reach the high places you haven’t finished building yet. It means offering students a way to build their understanding step by step, so that each new understanding fits into what they’ve already learned. In pedagogy (the science of teaching and learning) there is a concept called scaffolding. That’s when it’s useful to be able to downshift. But sometimes the going gets rough and you know that if you stay in high gear you’ll stall out. It’s like driving a car when you are cruising along and everything is fine, third gear is the place to be. In actual practice, all of these things are likely to happen to anyone who commits to contemplative practice, so you get to have your cake and eat it too.īelow is a prescription for the happiness that is independent of conditions. When happiness becomes your baseline, it frees up a lot of energy to be free, have interesting experiences, and find out what is true. For me, the best reason to practice is to find the happiness that is not dependent upon conditions. Some people want to find out what is true. Some people want to have interesting experiences.
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Some people want to be free from suffering. People do contemplative practice for different reasons.