3 Key Insights of Vipassana Meditation: Part 1
Let’s illuminate the human condition with insights from one of the most powerful and popular meditation systems yet created: Vipassana.
To me, the beauty of Vipassana meditation is its directness. There’s not a lot of belief or superstition. It says: “here’s how we meditate”, “here are the insights this mediation gives us”, “go and discover these for yourself.”
While we won’t cover specific Vipassana instructions — I have in-depth articles on both the Mahasi Sayadaw and the U Ba Khin methods elsewhere — we will extract all the wisdom from the Vipassana tradition and see what it means for our lives.
Warning: this isn’t a philosophical argument or a theological model of mind and body. The point is to verify all of this by diving into your first-person experience through Vipassana practice.
But quickly, what is Vipassana meditation?
What is Vipassana?
There are several varieties. Vipassana simply means “clear seeing”, and there are many roads to that clear seeing. Indeed, you can see the influence of this school in secular, modern mindfulness.
In this context, clear seeing means paying exquisite attention to our moment-to-moment experience, uncovering its workings, and allowing those discoveries to transform us.
The essence of Vipassana is developing the various aspects of clear seeing until we have profound insights into who we are — it’s precisely those insights that we’ll cover now.
Three Core Insights of Vipassana
- Anicca: Impermanence
The Sanskrit word anicca runs through Buddhist literature and is a key part of U Ba Khin’s Vipasanna system.
Anicca translates to impermanence. In this context, it means that everything in our first-person experience is transient.
In the realm of Vipassana, we tend to work with breath and body; the insight of anicca is that all our thoughts, emotions and sensations come and go. They’re not eternal.
When we contact this transience through prolonged meditation practice, our relationship to our mental–emotional world changes. We’re less driven. We take our emotions less personally. We find a deeper, permanent source of peace — a point we’ll return to.
2. Kalapas: The Quantum Packets of Experience
So if it’s true that our experience isn’t solid after all, what is it composed of?
Vipassana suggests that it’s made of kalapas. Think of these as the fundamental building blocks of all sensations. If you bring your attentional microscope to any sensory experience — whether emotions, thoughts, tastes, sights, or sounds — you’ll find that they’re all made up of tiny pieces, or kalapas.
Kalapas are the keys that unlock the door to impermanence. They’re extremely short lived, making them almost impercetible. But if we’re able to detect them and rest in their ever-changing flow, we’re resting in anicca and contacting a radical freedom from our senses.
3. Dukkha: Suffering and its Distortion
Perhaps the most important concept of the lot is dukkha, which means suffering. Dukkha is one of Buddhism’s Three Noble Truths, and the concept weaves through all Buddhist meditation practice. Vipassana is no different.
Vipassana relates dukkha with anicca, claiming that our suffering is caused by our lack of awareness of impermanence. When we experience our senses as rigid and solid, we also experience ourselves as a solid, separate, potentially suffering self.
Not only that, but this suffering drives us to act in dysfunctional, harmful ways. Unpleasant sensations arise, and our inability to process them optimally means they distort our behaviour and multiply our dissatisfaction.
By finding anicca permanently and reliably, we end dukka. The sense of solidity dissolves, as does our illusory rigid self. We rest in the nothingness that we’ve always been but have long forgotten.
In a nutshell, Vipassana is about undoing the sense of self to contact the Permanent — the stable, omnipotent awareness that underlies all sensory activity. The three concepts of anicca, dukkha and kalapas explain a lot, and we’ll look at three more next time.
