As you may have noticed, one of the core things we are keen on at Meditative.dev is using meditation as a vehicle for insight practice.
Insight in a general sense is defined as the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.
The types of insights we’re interested in here are ones that change our understanding of the nature of experience. Insights that change our perception of and relationship with self and world. As you likely already understand we can’t think our way to such insights. Thought is the wrong tool for the job.
We gain new insights by accumulating enough evidence on a sub-conscious level about certain aspects of experience that eventually the mind can’t maintain its pre-existing understanding. It then flips over into a new relationship with self and world.
In traditional Buddhism, these aspects of experience are known as the Three Characteristics (Three Marks of Existence): impermanence, suffering/unsatisfactoriness and no-self. It is by attending to these aspects of experience that we set about accumulating the evidence we need to provoke the deep changes in the mind that are traditionally understood as awakening.
Here it might be worth mentioning the role concentration plays when looking at things using this framing. Concentration increases the speed or effectiveness of the evidence accumulation. We only get paid in insight for time on task.
While the Three Characteristics have been talked about previously, we’re going to start taking a more detailed look at each one and techniques that can help us with get that evidence we need for insight.
Today we start with impermanence.