Daniel M. Ingram:
Another debate that has been discussed here is insight practice or AF or both and if so, how to combine them?
...
Both Trent and Tarin claimed arahatship with jhana abilities before deciding to explore AF (though I believe Tarin had played around with it years ago and pre-stream entry), and both of them regularly help people with their insight practice here, and thus must see the value in these practices and conceptual frameworks or presumably wouldn't.
i see value in insight practice (as well as the conceptual framework(s) used here in conjunction with it), otherwise i would not spend my time helping people who want to do them successfully (and all the better if they also have the good sense to be aiming at an actual freedom for themselves).
Daniel M. Ingram:
Richard also explored various insight practices and apparently had some success with them pre-AF. However, others didn't, though many had long meditation/spiritual questing histories in various traditions before coming to AF.
while richard has never learnt from or practised meditation in any school or tradition, and yet has has described getting path, as well as entering nirodha samapatti, both of which presupposes jhana experience (as does all the psychic phenomena he also reported experiencing during his enlightened years).
Daniel M. Ingram:
Thus, the question remains: is it easier, in their opinion, to see the value of AF and to attain AF after having become accomplished insight practitioners, (...)
it is probably easier to appreciate the value of actual freedom (and possibly easier to attain it) after becoming more accomplished at insight practice, unless, along the way, one gets one's head stuck up one's ass (about what is and isn't possible and for what one ought and ought not to strive) to such a degree as to cause one to overlook the value of an actual freedom, and to mistake it for a foolish ideal one may have once had (but have now wised up to its impossibility/undesirability) rather than comprehending it as the living actuality that it is.
Daniel M. Ingram:
(...) and how would they recommend that people apply the various practices and teachings of insight and AF specifically, particularly regarding timing?
i would recommend that people who want the totally suffering-less, fairytale paradise which is possible to live, here and now, start with AF and give figuring out how they're experiencing this moment of being alive a sincere go before taking up any alternate routes.
i would recommend that people who don't really care about want to do insight practice really badly get stream-entry and then figure out what they really want (which may be easier to see from there), and then take things from there.
Daniel M. Ingram:
How would they recommend that practitioners use the various frameworks and techniques available to maximize practitioners' success and happiness?
i would recommend that practitioners care more about the results than the methods they use to achieve them.
Daniel M. Ingram:
Specifically, some of the frameworks and emphases are seemingly at odds to various degrees, such as looking into suffering and also cultivating felicitous feelings, as well as inhabiting this flesh and blood body and noticing the transience of the sensations that make up the whole sense field. Insight practices emphasize causality and things happening on their own, whereas AF emphases autonomy and things happening on their own. I think that the word "autonomy" requires some further definition here so that it can be compared and contrasted with the way no-self is used in insight practices.
the actualism method doesn't emphasise 'inhabiting this flesh and blood body', it emphasises noticing how your direct experience of this moment of being alive is *as* this flesh and blood body... and that any experience of feeling is a separation (no matter how refined) from this moment as it exactly is (which is where the sense of being an identity which can 'inhabit' the body comes from).
Daniel M. Ingram:
Further, insight practices tend to emphasize bare sensate investigation in a way that ignores being caught up in one's stuff, whereas AF emphasizes noticing emotions/feelings and then noticing the causes of how they arose and eliminating those causes, much as the sutta on the Removal of Distracting Thoughts, MN 20. These are clearly different, though related.
both ways are clearly useful. the relevant questions for the discerning practitioner are, then:
how do you want to live your everyday life?
what is the absolutely optimal way of living you consider to be possible .. and are you willing to find a way to live it full-time?
tarin