Can anyone elaborate a little on what Daniel is talking about when he repeatedly mentions the "quickness" of sensations as revealed through vipassana?

Why is this attribute so important (he emphasizes it several times)?

A lot of Buddhist material makes some intuitive sense to me, but quickness does not. It is also widely outside my realm of experience.

From MCTB:

"The primary agenda for doing insight practices is to increase our perceptual abilities so that the truths mentioned by the great mystics become obvious to us. Thus, rather than caring what we think, say or do, or caring about what altered state of consciousness we are in, when training in wisdom we actively work simply to increase the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our experience, whatever and however they may be."

And:

"The gold standard for insight practices is that we can quickly and consistently see the true nature of the numerous quick sensations that make up our whole reality, regardless of what those sensations are, allowing us to cut to a level of understanding that goes utterly beyond specific conditions."


-Adam

Hello,



The practice of vipassana is aimed at perceiving the most subtle layer of sensations possible, as clearly as possible, as consistently as possible, as "quickly" as possible. People often use the analogy of the white-noise static of a TV screen as a way to communicate what this is like to experience. Using that same analogy, think of how each blip on the tv screen (whether white or black) appears and disappears "quickly." It is there one moment, gone the next (it arises, then it passes).



If one one is able to clearly, consistency, and rapidly perceive sensations on the "vibration" level, one is able to progress in insight. The quality of these three is also telling of how far one has made it. For example, meditating to stream entry (or arhatship, or whatever) vipassana style requires a certain quality of these to be met.

By the way, the argument could be made that the three qualities I'm naming are really all the same, in that if you clearly perceive sensations as they happen, then you would be perceiving sensations rapidly arise/pass; and if you're doing that steadily, then you're consistently perceiving at a certain "level." Conceptually, it may be useful to think about them in either way (separate qualities, or the same general quality of perception); consider thinking about it in whatever way seems to make the most sense for you (the results of your sits when thinking one way or another will likely tell you which makes the most sense).

Does that help clarify?

Trent

Hi Trent,

Thanks for your response. I've been lurking here for a while and have learned a ton from your posts across the site - so thanks for those as well!

First, let me say that that your post is very clarifying, especially your proposed treatment of the three qualities of the vibrations as one. This makes a lot of sense to me. As you suggested, I will try sitting with both approaches, but I have an intuitive sense that the lumping approach will work best for me

However, I do suspect that I have a little further to go in understanding these vibrations conceptually. I understand that they are ultimately to be perceived experientially, but I can't shake the sense that I would benefit from "getting" it in the most conventional sense with slightly more clarity. I could be wrong, and I might need to simply spend the cushion time to find what you and Daniel have described. However, perhaps you'll indulge me just a little bit more . . .

So I've been sitting here for the past ten minutes trying to get at the core of my confusion so that my next question will be as useful as possible.

I've come to the conclusion that a description of your own personal experience with these vibrations might be most helpful to me. I have a bunch of questions about the specifics, and I'll rattle them off now, but due to my inexperience I'm sure that many of them will land poorly:

1) Are these vibrations visual? Did you see matter physically break up?
2) Did you try to "see" these vibrations, or did you just focus on the three characteristics and allow the vibrations to unfold on their own?
3) Do the vibrations appear the same way to everyone (generally speaking)?
4) If so, what are some of the most commonly shared characteristics of them?
5) The perceptual field of conventional, day to day reality and the field in which the vibrational fields arise: where do they meet? How are they related and how do they differ?

I will say that I can definitely perceive some sort of light "film" overlaying all of the objects in my visual field when I am focused. Sometimes during meditation with open eyes this film becomes increasingly texturized, rich and deep, as if increasing the contrast ratio when doing color correction of visual media. Is that something, or am I just being indulgent? If yes, it is related to the vibrations at all? My gut says yes?

I realize this is a long post, and that we are all busy people. I would say that I am in a particularly "rapturous" period of practice and tend to be long-winded. Please know that I am working on keeping things concise and sincerely appreciate the time you and everyone take in responding so thoughtfully to my posts. Thank you!

-Adam

Hi,



No prob, you're welcome.



They are very simple once experienced; you may want to just sit and investigate until you have an "ah-ha" moment regarding them. Don't try looking for something specific that references your conceptions, just try to experience the full depth of feeling in your index finger (or whatever) and see what happens. Each sensation you perceive, try to see if it's actually several different sensations.



Vibrations can be perceived visually (there is a long thread about this somewhere from the DhO migration), but you don't literally see matter break apart; it's more like a type of ripple or visual distortion.



I tried to perceive them in all the ways ways I could think to try (a general sense of investigation).



I can't say that for certain, but I presume that it is similar (we all have human brains, after all); that notion is also supported by the ability to reliably communicate about our experiences of them.



Tough to say, and I'm not sure it would be useful at all to try...



They're fundamentally the same (hence the index finger example above). The aim of vipassna is to perceive the day-to-day world of experience at a vibrational level (hence the loosely tossed around phrase "penetrate reality").



You may be onto something with that, although perhaps just as a source of motivation to investigate experience, so as to possibly discover / resolve that "film." The film and vibrations may be "related," but I haven't thought about it much. It does not seem very relevant to the other topics of this discussion anyway.

Trent