… Somebody says, “For insight you need to do one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. So you do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven without any thinking, without any reflection on what you’re doing, and yet that doesn’t give you any true insights. It gives you pre-programmed insights sometimes, but the actual startling new understandings that can come through …
… The teachings of meditation are not necessarily there to just be followed one, two, three, four and bingo! there you are: Bliss. Oneness. Awakening. You’ve got to keep reflecting on what you’re doing, what results are coming, what adjustments have to be made. If things don’t seem to be working out, use your ingenuity.
Of course, there are some general parameters …
… So you find, as you’re sitting here, that it’s not just in-out,
in-out, one, two, three, four, buddho, buddho. There’s a lot going
on with the breath energy and a lot of different ways the mind can
relate to it. The reason we need so much time to practice meditation
is to get a sense of what’s going …
… It sounds like a one, two, three, four process, but it’s not really. All four factors influence one another. As you put the Dhamma into practice, that’s both a test of the Dhamma you’ve heard and also a test of the people you’ve been listening to, to see if they really are the admirable people you thought they were.
So …
… Then I was asked to go back and work on one, two, three, four, five,
up to ten.
I started out by imagining myself playing with just a couple of
friends present in the room, and then going up to more hostile and
more difficult environments until I finally got to the concert stage.
The practice was to visualize One and then breathe calmly …
… that inviting. One of the first
discussion groups I led when I came back here to the States, on the
four noble truths, went through four noble truths in order: one, two,
three, four. We got to the third noble truth and talked about nibbana.
Then we got to the fourth noble truth and we ended up talking about
jhana. Everybody in the group …
… So it’s not that you blindly follow steps one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You find which aspect of the mind is out of balance and then focus on the appropriate step until you find that you’ve got all of them covered. Again, this is a question of trial and error, testing to see which recommendation is appropriate for which particular …
… She frames the questions for the numbers one, two, three, and nine in exactly the same way as the Buddha does in AN 10:27:
“Rightly disenchanted, rightly dispassioned, rightly released, rightly seeing the total end, rightly breaking through with regard to x thing(s), a monk is one who puts an end to stress. With regard to which x thing(s)?”
Her answers …
… the ability to remember past lives – one, two, three, four, five, ten, one hundred, one thousand, depending on one’s powers of intuition. (This is a basis for proving whether death is followed by rebirth or annihilation.)
b. Cutūpapāta-ñāṇa: knowledge of where living beings are reborn – on refined levels or base – after they die.
c. Āsavakkhaya-ñāṇa: the awareness that enables one to …
… When you see the various lists placed down — one, two, three, four, five, six, whatever — it gives the impression that you start with one skillful quality and then drop it to move on to the next. Actually the process is more a question of gathering all the qualities together, and then leaning in the direction of one or another as is appropriate so that …
Appendix 2: Mnemonic Questions | Skill in Questions: How the Buddha Taught
… She frames the questions for the numbers one, two, three, and nine in exactly the same way as the Buddha does in AN 10:27: “Rightly disenchanted, rightly dispassioned, rightly released, rightly seeing the total end, rightly breaking through with regard to x thing(s), a monk is one who puts an end to stress. With regard to which x thing(s)?” Her answers …