I'm interested, too.

Perception is something you can train and there are many aspects to this training like:
- sorting out major control issues eg. typical perspective that perceptions are somehow perceived by you is one such issue
- creating references for sharpness/resolution
- optimizing resource usage and spreading workload across more parts of the nervous system
- process of "formatting" parts of nervous system to even be able to process perceptions
- creating accurate references
- calibrating senses
- making perceptions nicer and more pleasant - simply making your sensual experience more awesome

When your perception works optimally then when you do not perceive object there is no mind to perceive it and once there is object then mind is created for it with its separate consciousness and this mind is perceiving this object and while it can move to somewhere else it stays on the object. Processing is done on perception of the object in part of the nervous system which after just one full pass of processing is put to state of half-activation and next passes of perception are done in different parts of nervous system and then results are compared and combined to create what is being experienced. Of course these passes continue with more parts of mind and eventually difference won't be noticed and processing will be done with further passes of course happening but they won't "fill" anything anymore and there is experience of finishing perception. Object recognition is done inside perception automatically and there is neither need not perception of this object recognition action. Focus of sensual organs is controlled automatically so for example eyes always control themselves and there is never any conscious effort in trying to make things sharper or move them anywhere to see things. Proper perception also use memory and have tons of post processing to correct anything in the way to what you are perceiving.

If perception is untrained then you have convoluted structure where there is a mind which was created for something else but somehow it needs to move to part of the nervous system which processes sensual perception where you need to participate in focusing and control of the sense organs. Then you get the image but it will need to be recognized which you do by somehow recognizing things "yourself". Small amount of nervous system participate in perception and it is constantly overwritten so you look at static object and it doesn't look static. This whole process also feels like a chore. Mind you, if you have normal perception then most of perception is still automatic. There are just still things which you need to do in order to perceive things and the more convoluted your perception is then less useful details you get and more useless experiences like perspective of watcher which should not happen at all. Such perception also feels tiring to the point it creates suffering. It might not even be noticed because this suffering is always there, just like the fact that perception is not static is not noticed and both of these things are only recognized when perception is sorted and this suffering and movement is gone.

Untrained perception also is pretty unimpressive when it comes to its presentation. When working with sight once I made changes in the right direction the one immediate effect I had was that I started experiencing all objects and surfaces as touch, like I was literally touching everything which I saw and colors became incredibly vibrant, to the point of having jhanic qualities of piti and sukkha and started having tastes and smells which could only be described as "heavenly". When my sight was "normal" I experienced not jhanic bliss but suffering.

I mainly work with sight but perception on all sense doors got the same kind of improvement. Body is felt differently, I pretty much feel touch and quite sharply but body itself feels like jhana. Smell for example works in funny way because depending on what I want to smell I can smell real air or virtual air from what I see or from colors or visualized. It took years to get to any level of control and I even had perception issues after I started changing perception which issues literally forced me to learn how all this work including especially all the things related to brain resources allocation and knowing what causes suffering and how to deal with it. Or to put it differently, when I increased my perception capabilities then all flaws in my mind started to be directly experienced whereas previously they could hide behind all the noise my awareness generated so I could not ignore anything anymore.

This is quite a big topic and this summary as short as I could make it.

In general observing and investigating is also how I work with perception.
There is however quite a lot things you can observe and investigate and this observation can be different as can be ways you investigate.

In typical Vipassana practice descriptions you are supposed to observe qualities which do not exist. This is not observation but visualization practice. Investigation can be pretty passive or can you can literally change things in your brain and try all sorts of things to see how they affect perception. By general rule I would say that if you do not aim at improving specific quality of your perception then any such observations/investigations won't improve it, especially when you are focused at executing practices as they are described or temporary ideas from your mind.

Vipassana practices of course do affect perception and some effects on perception like non-duality are aligned with "good perception" nicely. There is specific quality to perception that Vipassana gives and it is not exactly as "pure" as perception can be made. I am not sure what is the limit of doing it simply Vipassana-way but because even people like Daniel not report certain things I assume that things I noticed about how Vipassana change perception are valid.

In the other thread I said that insight practices have no end. This is exactly why. Vipassana will make you feel some definitive end but this perception of completeness is result of specific configuration that is created by these practices and practice of perception itself have no end.

I would be careful with name "insight" in relation to Vipassana practices because most experiences and mind states resulting from them are visualizations and there is very little actual knowledge gained there on the level of these practices and certainly calling any experiences as insight is overstretching definition of word "insight".

Insight/knowledge is result of contemplation in which you actually create models of how these things work, challenge these models and refine them.


In Mahasi noting you are typically instructed to observe 3C or Three Characteristics. Typically you do not perceive anything like impermanence aspects to sensation, suffering aspects or no-self aspects. When you observe sensations and think about these characteristics you create connections in mind which add these characteristics directly to sensations and they arise with these qualities and that is how you get to experience these aspects. This is directly how I do mind state visualization, it is all about timing of experienced things and having just the right activation states to strengthen process of making these connections. Normally you do not know how to do mind state visualization and but due to repetitive nature of these Vipassana practices and time they take you are still programming them, just less directly than if you did it via mind state visualization.

Try practicing Vipassana-like practice but in which you observe characteristics of jhanic pleasure of sensations or even jhanic bliss of your normal sensual perception in waking state and over time you will experience jhanic qualities in all sensations and on all senses on which you did these practices. They will arise with exactly these qualities.

Investigating and figuring out how given practice generate results is what I would call "insight practice". Doing these practices and getting the results I would never call as insight practice because just having effects does not give you knowledge about how any of it works. Also imho being meticulous about these definitions is very important as it directly affect how you think about things and can influence it in grand ways. Especially because when you do meditation and enter deep concentration states your intellect is kinda challenged and you are more likely to believe in words you use. When you do not call things like "fruition" as insight then it naturally beg the question "then what insight I could have about this event/mind state?" and stimulates you to do contemplation.


Yes, they kinda are.
Vipassana however in Buddhist descripions is utilizing very specific mechanism of getting to non-duality and it is this mechanism and their effects which create the specific flavor of experience which make experience feel in the way that is then called non-duality. The way I practiced most of the time does not add this quality but open sense doors to experiences related to perceptions creating all-sense synesthesia. Last few years I did however use mind states resulting from Vipassana and had quite a lot of this quality in my experience. It is intrinsically easier to use but it also does not provide as much actual feedback about what happens in your brain and is thus worse for investigations and observations and getting actual insight.

Normal Vipassana does not create synesthesia because the moment you process given perception you have activations in all the parts of brain which you conditioned yourself to have active when processing sensations and this is then experienced on all sense doors filling these doors. These doors are always present and need to be filled with something and normally people fill them with sense of self and this is why they experience themselves observing world.

I doubt pure Vipassana eventually lead to making all perceptions being experienced on all sense doors because this is not described in dharma book. Arhats do not talk about it. Daniel kinda went in this direction with his Actualism practices but these were not exactly that either and from what I know Daniel did not really move out of non-duality to just pure all-sense synesthesia experience.

Thing to note here would be that actual suffering and its ellimination does not have anything with duality or non-duality or synesthesia or whatever but not overusing parts of your brain to the point they get tired and generate firing patterns which are interpreted by brain as "there exists pain" and then create consciousness of suffering. One could as well have such "dual" sense of self based mind that does switch between parts of brain which generate this duality/dual perception on coarse enough level to not generate normal perception but without any suffering. One could also have sense of self but switch in on per-object basis making all objects appear as observing itself. I tested many such options and tested what actually causes me to suffer in all these options, hence my conclusions.


The mind states / perception resulting from Vipassana (Mahasi Noting) are simply very easy to manage and hard to screw up and this is why this "non-duality" it is making this type of suffering to not not arise as much. It is actually very clever technology. Just having two out of three 3C will trigger switch in used brain resources and this is experienced as fruition which is itself forced switch of used brain parts but on larger scale in the brain. The same action happens all the time in "non-duality" exactly because of having 3C programmed/visualized in to sensations.

I would not however say that even people who managed to configure their minds to have it all the time posses any insight/knowledge about how it all works. It is obvious when you know and read what they say about non-duality and their practices... This is why I say that perception of even people who practice Vipassana is severely lacking resolving qualities needed to perceive these things. I practiced perception and when I experienced fruition it was obvious to me that at some point in time parts of the brain which were in use were marked to shut down, new parts started arising and fruition moment itself was the moment activity switched. Then new parts didn't really know how to do it resulting in some fancy perception effects. These new brain parts generate pleasure because activating brain parts which are well rested generate pleasure. Resting parts which are tired also generate pleasure, thus fruition generate its specific afterglow. After experiencing it for some time I learned how this work and directly use this switching of used brain parts and thus any suffering which would result from having tired brain parts won't affect me and this is irregardless of how my perception is configured. This is also why I talk a lot about brain resources, tired neurons, and so on.

BTW. When you remove normal sense of self experience and replace it with pure sensual experience on all sense doors then you loose mechanisms normally used for swtiching brain parts. This is why until you really know how it all works and can do it yourself separately these perceptions are incredibly hard to sustain, especially without some nasty side effects in perception. When we are very young we have synesthesia but quickly it is replaced by mechanisms which can switch used brain parts and which then fill our experiences instead of us having pure perceptions. It is just that some times for some people these mechanisms start to fail because we cling too much to our own experience of ourselves and which causes us to not let our brains switch these parts of brain. Then doing Vipassana and replacing these mechanisms with clever visualizations provides different mechanism of switching brain parts and this helps with the suffering caused by having tired brain parts.