Morgan Taylor:
I feel like I've reached the "Mind and Body" stage--i.e. when I contemplate anatta enough, my sense of self shatters into the five aggregates--but it's like, okay, I get the point, so how is continuing to do this going to help me?
what was that experience like? was there less suffering in that experience than what arises in your daily life? would you like your experience to be like that all the time? and if not, why not?
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paying really really close attention to the sensations perceivable at every moment ("reality")--leads to clearer and clearer perception("higher and higher levels of insight") because you are sharpening your tools for perceiving more clearly. It's not what you're looking at that changes and becomes more revealing of insight, but it's your ability to perceive that gets sharpened and fine-tuned so that reality is seen more clearly and therefore understood in a deeper way. but in order to keep upgrading the ability to look, we need to keep looking at stuff.
and yes there are altered states and trance-like things that may crop up from time to time, but unless your main goal is just to have interesting experiences, they are just side effects (and for some people very helpful tools) in the process of sharpening perception.
as you sharpen and fine-tune your tools for clear perception (attention, alertness, concentration, energy, equanimity, relaxation, removing blockages) and start seeing all sensations more and more as rapidly arising and vanishing at each split second of your daily life, your experience will become finer, more and more empty of the illusion of self, and more free from suffering.
so instead of a way of looking around in order to find new things or a "truer reality", insight meditation is more like the sharpening a knife you already have so that it can cut through things you never imagined you could cut before, or upgrading your pixelated computer screen to one that has finer resolution, or cleaning your camera lens so that the image gets clearer and clearer, upgrading the auto-focus and zoom accuracy and speed, etc. It's the seer/experiencer and experiencing capacity that changes, and then--only as a result--what you see.
if I'm not mistaken, i think Daniel talks about "integration of insight" in his book. for me, that's the whole point of practice and the answer to your question "how will it help me." it's not just about seeing new things and finding new insight, but incorporating the new insight into every bit of your life, every second of it. and this is possible if the insight is really insight and is worth anything. if you really give insight meditation a serious trial, there are critical points that will come when some threshold or another of your experience is raised and your moment-to-moment daily life is never experienced without certain liberating insights ever again.
jill