Insight Meditation 03

To develop sensitivity towards the habitual overlaying of perceptional borders on all experience that arises within the six sense fields, in order to perceive its anatta nature. 

Summary: After preparing your attention as per the instructions in Preparing Your Attention for Insight, ground awareness within your body and observe the mirage like and unreliable nature of perception in regard to all of these until the borders of your body and mind lose their solidity or cease.

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With precise application of attention and using the elemental qualities as a doorway in, the mirage like quality of perception can be observed and penetrated. The function of perception is most easily observed by intentionally bring your awareness to any point of contact between your body and something else.

When resting attention on the elemental qualities the mind created borders of perception dissolve. Learn to stay right on these borders so that perception does not return, soften into the elemental qualities present.

An example of a contact point is:

• Legs/buttocks pressing against your chair/mat.

Notice that when you bring your awareness to this contact point there is an image within your mind of your legs or buttocks and the chair or floor. Focusing in on the element qualities at that contact point observe how the perception becomes mirage like and then dissolves. 

All that is left is just the experience of touch. 

Systematically move through these points:

1. One hand touching the other.
2. Your arms/hands resting on your leg.
3. Legs/buttocks pressing against your chair/mat. 
4. Touch of your eyelids/lips.
5. Touch of air and clothes on your skin.
6. The touch of air as it flows within your body.
7. Allow your attention to wander.
8. Observe perception arise in contact with the six sense fields.

For point 7 you can observe:

• Sight: slowly open and close your eyes.
• Sound: set a timer to beep.
• Smell: burn incense.
• Taste: prearrange some food.
• Touch: use points of touch in your body.
• Awareness: use points of touch within the mind.

Questions:

Can you observe the perceptional overlays on each of these?

Can you notice perception cease, and all that remains is elemental qualities? 

You are ready to progress to Insight 04: Observe Attention Move when:

• You understand borders of perception in terms of their conditioned arising, ceasing, and as autonomous, illusionary overlays of the mind around experiences.

Please note that the recording and video for the practicality of instruction uses kaya-gata sati (mindfulness immersed within the body) as a foundation for enquiry for practical reasons rather than access unification or jhana.

• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• Insight Timer App: Guided Meditation.
• You Tube: Video Instructions.

We cannot make the experience of the borders of our body disappear, it is not something that we do, it is an experience that arises when we stop trying to do. It is our conceptualising of what we are experiencing that creates the borders of perception.

You asked: "I can also feel the air on my skin; is that the borderline of my body and the room?”

We do not feel the air on our body; the idea of air touching our skin is a mind created concept. 

What we feel is sensations of warmth, coolness etc that arise due to touch. Close your eyes gently now and become aware of just sitting in the room, the experience of it.

How can you actually know the room around you other than as a thought or memory? 

The floor touches you, but can you actually know the floor? 

Or can you only know pressure, hardness, softness, warmth, coolness etc? 

These sensations are not a border for anything; they are just sensations, just as they are. When you can be fully intimate with the actual experience, the elemental quality of touch, as it is, then the borders themselves will no longer exist. 

We use these elemental qualities because they are the reality from which our mind creates the world that we live within. They are the world before mind creation.

The habitual mind created world is grounded within layers of perception and concepts, based on our relationship towards past experiences, which obscure our ability to know what reality is and what is the conceptual reality created within our mind.

The Buddha referred to this as delusion, literally when we are in delusion, we cannot know it.

We can see this delusive quality quite clearly when during meditation we suddenly realise that we have been lost within thinking for a period of time and that we had completely forgotten what we were doing - that we were meditating. 

This coming back to reality is the re-establishing of mindfulness. The clarity of awareness through the re-establishing of mindfulness, compared to the clarity of awareness when we were lost within the mind created world of thinking is very clear. 

This highlights that delusion arises whenever mindfulness collapses.

Learning to clarify our perception of the elemental qualities of experience such as hardness, softness, pressure and warmth etc, starting with our body, creates a grounding point to reality in which to establish mindfulness and from which to observe when we have fallen into habitual patterns within our mind. 

Increased perception of these elemental qualities also breaks down and depersonalises experiences such as our body, likes, dislikes, emotions, thoughts and judgement by directing perception towards the experience of their elemental qualities rather than the conceptual content.