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A Dry Insight Technique for Attaining Path

Let's say you've been sitting around in equanimity for some months or years. (If you are not in the equanimity ñana, you can read this for the sake of information, but it won't do you any good to try the exercise.) You know you are close to Path. You know that one way to progress is to gradually ripen in equanimity and wait for something to pop. But, what if you are gung-ho, full of energy and out of patience? Is there a dry insight technique whereby you can use effort to push through to the end of the cycle?

Try this:

Choose some sensation within the body and stay with it until it pulses or vibrates, and stay with it some more to see what happens. For this exercise, you want to stay with one area, e.g. the knee, the foot, or the ankle, and be patient to see how subtle the vibrations get. Don't try to make them more subtle than they are, or force something that isn't there; just find out what's there. When you perceive vibrations, incline your mind toward the passing away of those sensations. Notice that things don't really "pass away," they STOP. COLD. If you can see the stopping precisely enough, you will eventually have either a Path moment, completing one of the four Paths of Enlightenment, or a Fruition moment from a previously attained Path. Whether it is a Path or a Fruition, it will be experienced as a momentary loss of consciousness. This is Theravada "cessation of mind and body." Upon emerging from that moment of unconsciousness, you know that you were somewhere very nice for awhile, but you can't say where you where. Traditionally, it's said that the mind "takes nibbana as object" during cessation.

I first got some insight into how to cultivate cessation while riding a train. I had attained First Path several years ealier, was now working toward Second Path, and was traveling from Bangkok to Penang, Malaysia on the overnight second class, "no air-con" train. I was sitting by the window, looking out to my left at the passing trees. I noticed that if I looked straight out the window, perpendicular to the direction the train was traveling, all I saw was a green blur. But if I looked as far ahead as I could, then quickly turned my head left, toward the side of the train, everything would come momentarily into focus. It was like a freeze-frame. I became fascinated with this and did it over and over again. Blur, blur, blur, (turn head quickly) FREEZE-FRAME. Then my mind began to flutter along with the blurred trees going by. Flutter, flutter, flutter, flutter, STOP. Flutter, flutter, flutter, flutter, STOP. I intuitively knew that this was relevant to my practice, but I didn't know exactly how. And I didn't get 2nd Path at this time. But a couple of months later, at Sayadaw U Kundala's monastery in Rangoon, I remembered this freeze-frame phenomenon and put it together with what U Kundala was saying about "inclining the mind toward the passing away of phenomena."

Like so many yogis, I was not clear about how I had gotten First Path, so I was not able to reproduce it while working toward Second Path. I was just practicing vipassana, fishing around in the dark, waiting for something to happen. But now U Kundala's instruction and the train experience had given me a direction. I began looking at short, strobing vibrations in my mind, each one about a half second long. Imagine a strobe light at a frequency similar to the speed at which you can flutter your eyelids. Ftrrrrrrp. Ftrrrrrrp. Ftrrrrrrp. Ftrrrrrrp. Each time the vibration/flutter/strobe ended, I saw that it had a very discrete end-point. It stopped COLD. I began noticing that other phenomena behaved the same way. Someone would speak a word or a phrase and when he stopped speaking, there would be this abrupt ending point. Everything had a discreet ending point. It was while watching the clear, clean ending points of vibration/flutter/strobes in the mind that I attained Second Path during a sitting. Inclining the mind toward the "passing away" of phenomena is a very powerful technique for attaining either First or Second Path.

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