How to cultivate insight of impermanence? This is the eight week of the course from the book life with full attention by Maitreyabandhu.
Anyone can experience moments of transcendence at any time. These moments are characterised by increased perspective, heightened significance, and a wordless sense of meaning.
Buddhism distinguishes between two levels of transcended awareness: glimpses of reality and insight into reality. Glimpses can be seen as ‘vision experiences.’ Insight is a wholly new orientation, away from self toward reality. Insight is an awareness of how things really are, free from the limitations of self.
After insight, our desire to change, grow, be wise, kind, courageous, mindful, and creative comes naturally. We do not need to make an effort to make an effort. Effort becomes playful, spontaneous, and responsive. After insight, the path is no longer needed—we become the path.
Vision experiences (glimpses) are a prefiguration of insight. But vision experiences are not the goal of insight, and neither are they needed to achieve it.
The Buddha says that the best thing to reflect on to gain insight, is the fact of impermanence. To realise that arising and ceasing are happening at the same time. If we see that arising and ceasing are what life is all the time, we start to ‘hang loose’ to experience. We watch things come and go without attachment. We are no longer fighting life, we let go and allow anything to happen.
Cultivating insight
To the emergence of insight, we need to cultivate clarity, integration, sustained concentration, positive emotion, faith, and single-minded dedication. Each is explained in more detail below.
- We need to attain clarity about what it is we are aiming for. We can gain clarity though learning and reflection.
- Furthermore, psychological integration of thought is a prerequisite for clarity. To gain clarity we need to experience what we learn, not merely grasp it intellectually.
- Once we are psychologically integrated, we can become concentrated. Sustained awareness is a prerequisite to insight. To this end, we need to separate ourselves from the competing demands of the attention-deficit society wherever possible. For example, by going on retreats from time to time.
- When we reflect in a negative state of mind, our reflections will be prejudiced by our negativity. This pushes us away from reality and isolates us. We develop positive emotion by cultivating our virtues and strengths (week 5).
- We need faith; an intuitive sense of there being more to life than the every-day mind.
- Single-minded dedication is a clear sense of existential priorities, an emotional commitment to life with full attention. It is the desire to put spiritual practice at the centre of our life.
Eighth practice week
When trying to cultivate insight, it is important to keep an eye out on your emotional state. If you are becoming unhappy when practicing the insight of impermanence, you need to re-establish yourself in the previous states.
When we reflect on the nature of reality, we try to cultivate wisdom, not intellectual sophistication. We need to establish ourselves in the states of mind described before to cultivate insight. We need to become deeply curious about the true nature of experience.
There are several ways to integrate reflections into our day-to-day lives. You should try the ones that resonate most:
- Find a phrase that captures the reality of impermanence that you can bring to mind in experience. For example: “this too, will pass” or “all things are impermanent. See which sentence you can experience, not just recite.
- When we look forward to something, imagine that it is already over. you can do the same when you do not look forward to something, too.
- Try to see that everything that happens to us is teaching the truth of impermanence.
- Notice how you expect things not to change.
- Keep track in your journal of when you experience change as a good or as a bad thing.
- Become aware of when your positive or negative predictions turn out to be wrong.
- Try to see what is ceasing in arising, and what is arising in ceasing.
- Bring death to mind, as it makes us want to live deeply. You will remember that this moment is all you have, and you will consciously find something to appreciate.
During the mindfulness walk, see if all the necessary states of mind are present for insight to emerge. If you feel like one of them is lacking, recognise this, and cultivate it. When all are present, you can bring to mind reflections on impermanence. You can, for example, label the things that arise and cease, both internally and externally.
During the mindfulness moment too, see if you can bring to mind reflections on impermanence. Try to observe any change that happens and realise its nature.
The instructions for the meditations are as follows:
- Day 1: start by scanning the body and noticing the general feeling tone of your body—vedana. Are there internal narratives? What dhamma do you need to bring to mind? Then focus on the breath, trying to notice what you are experiencing or what is you thinking about experience.
- Day 2: start as during the previous day and then bring your attention to the heart area. Once you have established peaceful awareness, cultivate loving kindness using the mantras from the previous week.
- Day 3: establish yourself in body awareness and see if you can develop concentration. Try to develop clarity about the changing nature of the breath.
- Day 4: spend some time developing body awareness, noticing any tensions and embrace them with kindly awareness. See if you can relax around the breath more and more. Take your attention to the chest area and say to yourself your preferred mantras of loving-kindness. Then try to extend this loving-kindness to a friend, someone you are uneasy with, and others from there.
- Day 5: start the same way as during the first day. Bring your attention to the breath and then pay particular attention to what happens when you get distracted. Observe the impermanence of whatever it is we are distracted by.
- Day 6: try to cultivate a warm and appreciative awareness. Tune into the changing nature of experience. Try to get closer to what is actually happening, rather than what you think is happening.
- Day 7: focus on an area of discomfort in the body. See if you can feel it without describing it or reacting to it. Then see if you can feel change happening, as a lived experience.
