Excerpts from http://kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/
People do contemplative practice for different reasons. Some
people want to be free from suffering. Some people want to have
interesting experiences. Some people want to find out what is true.
For me, the best reason to practice is to find the happiness that
is not dependent upon conditions. When happiness becomes your
baseline, it frees up a lot of energy to be free, have interesting
experiences, and find out what is true. In actual practice, all of
these things are likely to happen to anyone who commits to
contemplative practice, so you get to have your cake and eat it
too.
Below is a prescription for the happiness that is independent of
conditions. I call it the 3-Speed Transmission. It's like driving a
car; when you are cruising along and everything is fine, third gear
is the place to be. But sometimes the going gets rough and you know
that if you stay in high gear you'll stall out. That's when it's
useful to be able to downshift.
In pedagogy (the science of teaching and learning) there is a
concept called "scaffolding." It means offering students a way to
build their understanding step by step, so that each new
understanding fits into what they've already learned. It's like
building a scaffold around a house; you can climb up the scaffold
to reach the high places you haven't finished building yet. If
learning is carefully scaffolded, there will always be something to
hang each new bit of learning on as it comes in. This association
of each new bit of understanding with what has gone before helps
you to retain knowledge better because anything you learn within a
larger context is hard to forget or confuse. Later, as we shall
see, the understanding we are most interested in is not related to
knowledge in the usual sense. And it doesn't need anywhere to hang.
All of the scaffolding is only a temporary device to help you find
the confidence to abandon the building project entirely and find
that you already are the happiness you seek.
The most gifted among you may find that you can just stay in third
gear nearly all the time. For you, the happiness that does not
depend on conditions may become second nature as soon as it is
pointed out to you. For many of us, though, the conditioning to
live in our thoughts is very strong. In that case, it's helpful to
have 2nd and 1st gear so that when things get tough or confusing we
can still do a practice that is accessible and that doesn't leave
us feeling overwhelmed.
So, without further ado, here is the 3-Speed Transmission: (First
I'll present the thumbnail version, then elaborate on each
theme.)
3rd gear: If you can just let it
be, understanding in your heart and in your bones that the
happiness and peace you seek are your own true nature, then let it
be. This is known as recognizing buddha nature or dwelling in
buddha mind.
If you are distracted and unable to rest in buddha mind, downshift
to:
2nd gear: Ask "Who am I?" until awareness turns
back on itself. Cultivate the "witness," becoming
absorbed in the perspective of awareness taking itself as
object.
If, for whatever reason, dwelling as the witness isn't feasible,
downshift to:
1st gear: Balance investigation
(vipassana) and concentration
(samatha). Use mental noting until the noticing is
automatic, then just concentrate and notice. The genius of
vipassana is that there is never a time when it can't be done. So
it's the ultimate safety net and 1st gear practice. It also has the
feature of being effective all the way to arahatship (the Fourth of
the Four Paths of Enlightenment as described in Theravada
Buddhism). So, it's by no means a low-grade or substandard
practice. Quite the opposite, it's a very sophisticated technology
of enlightenment. Used correctly, together with the other practices
listed in this recipe, it's a rocket ship to the moon.
For an more in-depth description of each of the 3 Speeds, click on
the links (menu at upper left of every page on this site) labeled
1st Gear, 2nd Gear, and 3rd Gear.
Kenneth Folk
July 2009