Note: I feel free to edit my posts without tagging them as such until someone has responded. I felt moved to re-write my last little essay several times yesterday, and am grateful that you guys didn't answer right away. I kind of got writing here... and this grew to quite a length. I hope you and others who look it up later find it helpful, even if I may be rambling a bit at times, especially towards the end. I am grateful for the questions you ask, because in answering them I am putting my thoughts on the matter in ever better order, even if I am not polishing the text to quite the level of, say, a published article.In my judgement, the 3C's are as archaic and out-of-date as "Earth, Water, Air, and Fire" as a basis for chemistry. Better off with a periodic table of the elements, if you can find one! And yet, the old system did capture a certain truth about nature that we don't want to discard, namely that matter appears in four states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Ingram has made an invaluable contribution to pragmatic dharma by mapping a shift "from content to insight", even if he used the traditional scheme of the 3C's as the qualification of what he meant by "insight". The 3C's have worked adequately well for thousands of years for significant numbers of people to get enlightened -- though as yet, only a minuscule fraction of the human population as a whole. We must do better. Insisting that the Three Characteristics are the end of the story would be an unfortunate regression vis a vis Dewart's philosophy. For insight practice, today, however, the 3C's are a vastly better place to start than what happens, as MCTB describes, in mainstream contemporary dharma.
Here is a technological analogy: the 3C's are like the steam engine; vastly better than a bucket brigade or even a windmill for pumping water, say, but not as good as an electric turbine. Shinzen's system provides a "periodic table" of the "atoms" of sensory experience, and Dewart's analysis of human consciousness (and it's evolution) provides a non-mystical and philosophically rigorous way of understanding both our conscious experience and the nature of the defect which results in wide-spread absent-mindedness.
The key to using the 3C's skilfully is to grok that these are characteristics of conscious experience, not of objective phenomena. Conscious experience is mediate (i.e., not-immediate) experience. I am saying here -- in stark contrast to much of the usual dogma -- that there is no such thing as a "direct" or "immediate" conscious experience, except in the case of one or another aspect of your cognitive process sinking to the level of non-consciousness, which is actually just fine and totally functional and can even be fun if you want to accentuate that and do jhanas, for example, although that is not what you would probably be thinking that you are doing. Consciousness is mediated through empirically derived categorical concepts acquired through a wide range of factors including principally the experience of having learned to speak. In our culture, however, believe it or not, just about everybody actually learns to speak with a certain defect (subtly, but very, very significantly) and this results through a long socio-historical causal cascade in a widespread defect of consciousness that Dewart calls absent-mindedness, which could in more familiar terms here be described as the failure of most people, most of the time, to mature naturally and spontaneously to enlightenment sometime, say, in their late childhood or early adolescence.
The usual remedial fix for this problem is a period of strenuous and sustained re-training of certain habits of thought, which historically and traditionally has only been undertaken by the "religious" like monks and so forth, but is increasingly done by lay people like many here on DhO, KFD, and so on, as well as throughout the "mindfulness" movement burgeoning pervasively. Because the activity and experience (emphatically not the content) of speech is central to the acquisition of consciousness in the human being, it only makes sense that speech be a central aspect of the re-training of consciousness to fix the defect. The Buddha included "right speech" in the short list of things to mind, Noble Silence is commonly practised on retreat, there have been many steps in this direction. Recently (in historical terms) the innovation of noting in vipassana has taken it all to a whole new level, putting the experience of the activity of speech right into the very heart of insight meditation practice.
Now as for the "3C's" themselves, they are actually empirically derived categorical concepts, without which you could not enjoy the fully conscious life (even if defectively so) that every normal mature human being enjoys even if they have never heard of Buddhism, philosophy, or any of it. All concious experience has three primary aspects which, with training, can be picked out or analysed independently. Doing the exercises necessary to learn how to do this, as it happens, usually takes one well along the way to correcting the defect of consciousness which impedes enlightenment in the individual and blights our civilization collectively.
What is traditionally called "Suffering" is the inherent purposiveness of all living things raised to the level of wanting on purpose and realizing, by the way, that it often ends there. Sometimes -- often -- desire is frustrated! Be present to it, but get over it. Through the mechanism of projection, this aspect of conscious experience can be used to understand lots and lots of useful things in the world. "The apple wants to fall so the seeds get to the ground." It doesn't, really, it just falls; but by framing my experience of falling apples in terms of my empirically derived categorical concept of final causality, I can "make sense" of it. Similarly, "all of life is suffering." Well, not in some downer way -- and there are some great lectures by John Peacock about what Sid may have actually meant by dukkha, that clearly isn't what I am proposing, but equally isn't what most others are saying about it today either -- but all of life is informed by purposiveness, to stay alive, and the greater the level of sentience throughout the progression of evolution the more "on purpose" purposiveness becomes until humans can include the quality of purposiveness in their actual, conscious, real-time experience. All you have to do is notice (a) that there is such a thing as desire and that (b) things seldom go the way you "want" and Bingo! one generalization later we have the fundamental insight is that "all of life is suffering." Most people then proceed to get completely side-tracked by the quality of "unpleasantness", etc., etc., etc., content, content, content.
Meaning, by the way, can be understood very simply as the "Feel In" that you would get if you were to say what you experience another saying. It depends on empathy. The words of another are incomprehensible (meaningless) to you if you could not conceivably have uttered and meant them yourself. The words themselves are "just" sounds, except insofar as they happen to be the sounds that you could have meant, which you then understand the other to have meant. This is significant when it comes to selecting a noting vocabulary. You need a vocabulary that you
understand, even though you are
emphatically not practising understanding when you are doing vipassana with noting.
"Impermanence" has to do with the temporality of experience and the phenomenon of cause and effect. The world we live in is constantly becoming, unfolding, happening. In order to adjust ourselves consciously to this aspect of our situation, it is helpful (indeed, indispensable) to have a categorical concept with which to process our experience. This is not a "filter" which detracts somehow from an otherwise pure or direct experience; it is a way of speaking about a way of "doing" our cognition which enables us to function normally and adequately in the world. Moreover, a focus on impermanence necessarily shifts one's focus from the static to the dynamic aspects objects which can kind of widen the spotlight of awareness, so to speak, to include the (always dynamic!) activity or process of experiencing along with the always present objects of experience. Think about it: static objects are an abstraction, not an experience. Back to the apple falling, and the causality of it -- and I want to stress this point: the apple does not fall "because" of gravity, or "because" of some curvature of space-time, or even for that matter "because" of some inherent principle of heaviness in apples, or (heaven help me!) "because" of the genetics of the apple tree. It just falls. THEN, as a conscious human, experiencing that, and endowed with whichever apparatus of story-telling my culture has equipped me with, I may sometimes offer a narrative (spoken or written in words or numbers, doesn't matter) to organize and make sense of my experience. If I happen to be a traditional Buddhist, I may organize my experience with the category of "impermanence", and that is a most fruitful step if you pardon the pun. If I happen to be be a Greek or one of their scientific descendants, I will probably be so preoccupied with the apple and its "objective" behaviour that I will fail to notice that I am a conscious experiencer doing what we do all the time, which is telling stories about things.
"No-self" has to do with the reality of the real, which is always relative to something else other than which it is not. The self is most certainly not any "thing", per se, it is a property of the negative space between the object of experience and the activity of experiencing that arises in all conscious experiencers. All humans necessarily fill that negative space with culturally propagated and sanctioned stories about what it means to be a human being. Providing, ordering, imparting, and maintaining this collective narrative has traditionally been the province of religion and more recently of science and "secular" formal education -- the effect is the same; human beings depend upon institutionalized self-definition not because we "are selves" but because the properties of consciousness create a space within which (if you are not sufficiently clear about what is happening) there appears to be a "self". Ingram writes lots of really great stuff busting goofy no-self ideals in MCTB. Shinzen, with the patience of a saint, answers endless questions about the no-self and very helpfully points out that whereas with practice the "self" subsides, personality is often strengthened.
For a much fuller treatment of all of this, please read Leslie Dewart's book,
Evolution and Consciousness, summaries of which I have posted on my (recently neglected)
blog.
Alternately, or in addition, and perhaps sufficiently, please take Ingram's suggestion seriously enough to make a virtual religion out of it, so to speak: strive in practice to ignore "content" to the very best of your ability and drive relentlessly for "insight". The problem with Ingram's suggestion is that his proposed means of doing this depends on the traditional 3C's, which just don't make a lot of sense or seem particularly self-evident to most 21st Century people, unless they really go out of their way to immerse themselves in considerable amounts of ancillary historical/cultural context. Even so, that is quite attainable and some people manage do it, and it can work out just fine.
Concerning the 3C's, which I am saying correspond strikingly to Dewart's empirically derived categorical concepts: these have everything to do with the activity of being conscious, nothing to do with the objects of consciousness. The defect from which we suffer has to do with being blinded, dazzled, overwhelmed, overpowered, utterly preoccupied with the objects of our experience. Considering where we are coming from -- lower forms of animal life which are perfectly present to the objects of their experience, but even less present their own experiential activity than even the least self-aware but nevertheless normal mature human -- this is not surprising, and we are doing great to have this problem. To avoid cooking ourselves off the plant through global warming and survive as a species, however, we need to continue in the same direction and take full responsibility for being conscious.
Ingram's point is well taken that training in morality is the first and last training. If you are confused by the options, do what you are pondering, make a choice, and work with one thing until that feels done. I keep getting the impression, however, that if you are worried about meaning you could turn to face it squarely with some "Feel In" practice. Even there, though, in practice, be sure to do vipassana not philosophy, even and especially if philosophical thoughts arise. You know best.
What I am saying about noting vocabulary is that Shinzen's most recent manual has many great improvements in the organization of the scheme especially from a pedagogical point of view, at the expense (in my judgement) of a small but potentially significant syntactic regression. It isn't that vocabulary is "important" in and of itself, as if the "meaning of the words", in a semantic sense, had anything to do with the success of insight practice -- on the contrary! When noting, you should speak like a child who has only so far learned one-word utterances, and absolutely constrain yourself to that "level" of expression.
We are not unaware of the objects of our experience. What we are unaware of and need to practice is being "aware of" (present to) the activity of experiencing -- we need to move from content to insight. Shinzen's noting scheme, both old & new, brilliantly and masterful entirely drops the content of experience and puts the entire focus on the activity of experiencing itself! Getting worried about being more "specific" about what you happen to be experiencing (the objects) is a regression. Don't do that; stay at the generic level. Instead, examine the discomfort that arises from cutting yourself off from the addiction to a broken way of thinking. You can only do this if you invest in the up-front overhead of learning the "closed vocabulary", which will then constrain you to having no choice but to practice well and properly. Flash cards are helpful for learning Shinzen's vocabulary.
An alternative approach is to go the Mahasi route with an "open vocabulary" that emphasizes activities -- rising, seeing, touching, thinking, etc. -- but requires, it seems to me, more context and in-person modelling to grok the gestalt of it before one catches on to what one is supposed to be doing, and then requires greater discipline and concentration to actually pull it off. I couldn't do it, for example, even when I sequestered myself for three days and gave it my best effort. Interesting that my experience is the opposite of Christian's. My practice took off when I found Shinzen!
So far, I have failed to convince Shinzen to take into account Dewart's critique of the semantic complex of ontic civilization. Shinzen may be too deeply socialized in the culture of science (with its Greek, indeed Pythagorean, origins) to hear or believe what I am pointing out, or rather what Dewart was pointing out. Nobody knows everything, that's an impossible ideal, even for Shinzen who otherwise comes pretty close.
The workaround I propose for now in the narrow area of noting is simply to learn Shinzen's "old" vocabulary in parallel to the new and in practice to use one-word notes, ideally monosyllabic ones, which formally fit within the system as "custom" labels. If the Mahsi style suits you better, just do that.
I don't have any quick workarounds to the problem of why most human beings do not spontaneously and naturally mature to enlightenment at around the same time as they attain normal cognitive maturity, beyond of course vast amounts of mindfulness practice all around, and making E-Prime somehow replace English. A more modest and attainable short-term step in the right direction (i.e., to seek ways to break out of the semantic complex) might simply be getting a few more people than have heretofore done so to read and understand
Evolution and Consciousness, return to their work in diverse fields informed by the syntactic understanding of consciousness, and take it from there.