| | At times I have to question the extent to which we consider shamatha practice separate from insight. "There's no wisdom without concentration, no concentration without widsom; one who has both wisdom and concentration is close to peace." Many people seem to have stumbled into A&P/Dark Night territory by virtue of "pure" if unintentional concentration practices. My teacher has said that it's possible to over-develop certain factors of concentration, or to attempt to seek a false refuge in states (or its dumber cousin, to cultivate "the equanimity of a cow"), but his teacher says it's never possible to have too much concentration, and does not believe in the divide between shamatha and vipassana. And looking at the original texts, Sid says, "practice jhana." His own teachers both taught the formless realms.
Just practically speaking, I find that having concentration and samadhi (as Wallace explains it, by various degrees) helps to foster insight. In my experience, again, concentration seems to have caused this mess. Likewise I've found that getting enraptured (literally) in jhana begins to lose its appeal if you follow the canonical instructions to enter jhana, let it extinguish itself, then enter and leave jhana of your own accord, then repeat the whole process over and over. That, and developing tranquility lets me deal with more potentially difficult content in a dispassionate way, chopping it into the aggregates, examining each one, etc., or just making it easier to keep the object under examination. |