So I'm reading seeing that frees. And he talks about insight as a thing which lessens dukkha, and how there is sudden insight and essentially views which can help cultivate insight. And he goes on to talk about how view sculpts what we experience 


So my question is basically how would I actually go about proving or disproving this statement in a sit? Like isn't any view going to be thought based? So if you're sitting there with no thoughts (or at least no strong attachment to thoughts) what's the view there? 

But if view is thought based, and there are no strong thoughts, does that kinda create a more "objective perception"?

Also if certain views cultivated certain insights wouldn't it also imply that there really are some meditation techniques better than others?

This is a good question. You have picked up what I consider to be the very center of what Rob says in the book. 

Looking at this part of your question: "Like isn't any view going to be thought based? So if you're sitting there with no thoughts (or at least no strong attachment to thoughts) what's the view there?"

we have to consider what we mean by "thought." We can sit and not have verbal thoughts, or image thoughts, but we can still have some assumptions (which some people might also call thoughts, or ways of looking, or views, or samskara). For example, even without verbal or image thoughts, we might assume that we are located in three-dimensional space, we might assume that something is happening, we might assume that observation is taking place, and we might assume that we are not assuming anything and that "objective perception" is happening :-)

Perception itself is necessarily preconditioned by the way in which we look (I will avoid the word "view" because I don't want to get mixed up with "opinion"). Consider how you might react if, when meditating, you heard a footstep. That reaction, which might not involve any thought, and could be just an immediate physical response, would be different if you were in your own house and nobody had been home other than you when you started, and if you were in a center where people commonly passed. 

The neat thing about this kind of question is that it gets us to look at how all experience is dependent on conditions. If you keep playing with the exercises in Rob's book, I think you might be able to prove or disprove the statement to your satisfaction. But if you want to go further with this idea, there is a lovely book on this called This Being, That Becomes (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20881624). Of course, there is also the whole doctrine of dependent origination but we don't have to go that far into it to get a sense of what Rob is getting at. 

Huge topic. I've started and trashed about 10 replies.

Basically at some level, what we see is influenced by what we are looking for. Once you start seeing that, you start seeing it in a million different ways. 

Could you give a few obvious and nonobvious examples?

Yes, this is a huge deal.

My experience is that the mind is the source of every experience (for a reference see the Dhammapada), no matter what, with no exceptions. This means that we're always framing what we see/hear/touch/taste/etc. No experience can be said to be without some flavor of mind (and its accompanying filters) because every experience is the mind. This realization caused me to drop all expectations that any experience can be truly objective. There is, to put it mildly, no such thing. Experience is, by definition, mind. Nothing exists without mind.

The flow of experience is mind followed by mind followed by mind - all influenced by.... mind. We exist in freefall. There is no solid, permanent, reliable ground to stand on. We need to get used to this disorienting reality. It is, certainly at first, disquieting and uncomfortable.

To put this in the context of the OP - assume every view is relative and mind-made.

(BTW - this is what the cessation of experience in stream-entry reveals to us. Mind is creating the subject-object duality of experience and without it - POOF! We and all else --> gone. No mind.)

I think I just said the same thing too many times, but it's worth repeating. It also implies that all of our most basic assumptions about literally everything are.... (fill in the blank) 

Here's a big one for meditators:  "This is suffering" vs. "This is purification"  

Somewhere in Alan Chapman's magick stuff he mentions doing something like these exercises: 1) for two weeks believe that you are a meat robot, trapped on a rock floating in the infinite void, in a pointless universe that happened by chance... record the results. 2) for two weeks believe that you are a spiritual being, incarnate in a physical body, in a meaningful and wonderous universe... record the results. 


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Ahhhh or like when I started off doing breath meditation and suddenly samadhi became a yardstick to measure good or bad with, and it drove me nuts, until I switched to more mindfulness and suddenly it becomes "wait why are they called hindrances? They don't seem to be hindering a thing"

Ohhhh I think I'm starting to see another point he makes early on, we have a default assumption that the stuff we see is real/inherently exists.

So when thoughts or opinions do come up as sensory objects, we assume there is an inherent reality to what they are saying because their reality exists in the world of concepts and "truth"- but this is just one layer of perception! Versus say a table, where it's inherent reality would be "out there in a world of things in themselves". Which is targeting a very different layer of perception.

Indeed! That is the stuff!

It's a massively useful book. I've read it three times and there are still bits in the last half that I would like to read again. 

Questions arise:

Is Burbea pointing to the existence of "layers" of perception, or is it something deeper? Where is the table? Is it really "out there? What is "inherent reality?"

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Well there aren't layers to reality, that was a poor wording on my part. It's better say you deconstruct it in parts. For example the journey up to stream entry seems largely based around deconstruction of the illusion of self, which might involve realizing the past and future only exist via memory and imagination. Whereas deeper deconstruction of time probably happens later.

If I had to guess, there are probably aspects of emptiness to be realized within the five aggregates, six sense bases, or however you want to break up reality. Like it seems as if this notion of the stream of consciousness might go at some point. So it's not a strict perceptual thing.

I remember one of my friends used the term consensus reality one time, and I think that might be a better term than "inherent reality". Like the table isn't there, it isn't anywhere (close your eyes and where did it go?), it appears and disappears.

But all this is easier said than deeply realized.

Since getting into EQ I've noticed more of a dreamlike feeling. Since you're sensing so much data at once, but never really remembering it, it always feels like you just got to where you are right now magically, without cause, like in a dream. Most of the people in your past you'll never meet again and so they don't really exist anymore. And who knows when the last time you see someone or do something will be. But I bring all this up because this aspect of strangeness seems like it might be the way into emptiness. But that's my guess.

My advice is to follow your investigations all the way -  to eliminating prejudice, habit and deeply held belief about how this reality is pieced together. This does resolve if the path is reverently and diligently pursued. 

I don't think views have to be thought based, are they aggregate based perhaps? something else? I don't know...


Some meditation techniques are better than others at different times, for different people, in different developmental stages. The pointing out instruction I might receive today may be quite different to what I was given a year ago. And for good reason. It's not better in a concrete objective sense, it's better in a fluid, contextual sense. 

​​​​​​​I can't just give you some view that will make you enlightened. But you can interface with a forum like this or a teacher and receive wise instruction on views that may be helpful to you at this particular point in time. 
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By continuing to sit regularly. Then one may also prove this:


Just don't always expect an intellectual proof. 

Chris makes awesome points above. 

Great question. !! Very thought provoking. 

So ... I can give an intellectual explanation.  Not sure if it is useful as the thread has said everything that needs to be said.  And an intellectual explanation is just 'right view', it is not the same as experiencing it for yourself, not the same as insight. But here goes, for those who bend towards such things.

Sensory input is processed in multiple stages, and reacted to in multiple stages, and those reactions affect subsequent processing. This is not really a simple linear process, like langauge, but is rather richly interconnected with multiple feedback loops. So langauge usually falls a bit short in documenting how we construct our reality out of sensory information.

First, information falls on the sense organs and is processed at a basic level to be something other than noise.  The sensory cortices process further, perhaps identiying components like colour or shape. Then from these we seek to recognise concepts, such as tables or chairs or faces.  So far this is very much like what computer vision does through neural networks. However, unlike neural networks, what we recognise depends a bit on the concepts we have learnt (our database of knowledge), what those concepts are connected to in memory (and thus how likely they are to be evoked), and how accessible those concepts are at the time (depending on their base salience, recent activation and number of connected concepts). This process is well-documented in psychology. The arising of both the base components and more sophisticated concepts then triggers reactions.  Some reactions are fairly hard-wired (firmware?) and some are more arbitrarily learned (software?), but both kinds can trigger more recognition, more construction of particular sensory realities.  Hopefully the arbitrary reactions are well-known on this forum, but for the more hardwired reactions consider that we might react in particular ways to, say, movement rather than stillness, to cool blue rather than putrid green, to snarling tigers rather than attractive people. These reactions may in turn trigger the application of more concepts, and more reactions, until the subconscious decides an appropriate response has been completed.

There may be some objective physical reality underlying our sensory process, but the construction of OUR sensory reality is fundamentally contingent on the wiring of our sensory system (salayatana), the concepts we apply to sensation (namarupa), and the reactions we have (sankhara). So the world is as objective as a Rosarch Ink Blot - what we perceive depends upon our inherent tendencies towards grasping after one thing or another. Do you see a bench or a coffee table? A pretty cloud or a dangerous thunderhead? Pythonesque code or a page of gobbledegook?  For anyone not persauded of this arbitrariness, do you know some animals see in black and white?  Others hear at higher or lower frequencies than humans?  Which is the objectively correct sensory reality? There is none.

So far these are fairly simple examples, what Rob is pointing goes well beyond to apply the same arbitrariness to much more fundamental aspects of our construction of perceptual reality and our sense of self. The practices in pursuit of this goal can operate consciously or subconsciously. Practices that deconstruct perceptions into sense quanta (different practices for different senses, by the way) teach the subconcious about the salayatana aspect of sensory consciousness, and help to rewire that part of the reality construction process.  Practices that reduce sankharas (purification) help to reduce the triggering from sense data to give us more space to work on this project. Practices that build concentration then enable mindfulness, and this helps us to see the construction of and our reaction to reality as it arrives. Allowing the growth of emptiness reduces the cognitive work being done, reducing the subtle and gross triggering, and reducing the use of cognitive resources. 

And then we can get to the end game - practices that not only recognise but CHANGE sensory reality to contradict the whole autonomic tiggering of suffering from our perceptions. These practices allow you to see things in completely different ways.  For example, seeing the components that make up 'pain' and transforming the experience into something different. Deconstructing the sense of movement into elements of repeated recognition, space, sound, and concatenated visual frames. Letting visual overcorrection subside, so the psychedelic elements present in basic vision swarm into the next level of processing, instead of being edited out. Observing how piti and sukkha are constructed during meditation, or off the cushion. Seeing the arbitrary nature of ambition, and how it is conditioned by particular frames of reference. Reconstructing love to be about the other person, and not about yourself. Developing the ability to create your own morality instead of accepting an imposation. Not only noticing the contruction of time, but being able to speed it up or slow down the perception of time. Moving your sense of self from your head, to your hands, to your feet, to the skin, and into the wind itself.  

Seeing a tree for what it is.

Have fun!

Malcolm

Oh come on! The self is an illusion, rites and rituals are baloney, and the Buddha was the man! Now can't I get my trophy? XD

"Just don't always expect an intellectual proof. "

What about expecting an intellectual poof? 


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Alright fine... can one of the Arahatmins give this guy access to the premium members area ? We usually save it for the Dakinis and those who are especially "meritorious".

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You smelt that?


The only view that matters is talking smack on the DO. That's the Buddha's baloney right there.