Vipassana for Web3 DeFi InfoSec
How to live as a human being while everything arises, persists and passes away?
This article is a continuation of my writing about new InfoSec foundations in the Web3 DeFi/ReFi sector. It is a brief introduction to the theory and practice of observing reality as it is, first mentioned in the previous Cyberpower Telenoia article. It is important to me because I cannot envision being an InfoSec professional without having a need to taste facts.
I care. I need to be able to know facts by direct experience. I have a need to work on myself because I am unclear. As long as I am unclear, I can’t be 100%.
In my work, along with millions of people, I found that one of the main spiritual transmissions on this planet contains a particular universal wisdom which was re-discoverd about 2500 years ago. This had been lost since antiquity. Next it was treasured remotely for over two millenia until 1969 when it resurfaced again at the right time. The practice of this wisdom was called Vipassana and it teaches how to sense reality. How to taste facts.
On Clarity
What is awareness in human experience? It is necessary to be able to recognize that there are people with developed awareness. It is such people that can offer a point-of-view of what a human being may become.
What is a sensation in human experience? It is necessary to be able to define one’s own personal direct experience of sensations. Otherwise it is not possible to have clarity of meaning in the experience of consciousness.
There can be no clarity of Vipassana without participating in a free ten day course available in most countries many times a year. We now live in a time when no understanding can be had whatsoever in any field, without clarity in the experience of sensations and of the fact that human psychological evolution is possible.
Why do most humans live in illusion? Because it is easy and requires no work, it seems like enlightenment. Why would a human want to function right and live to fruition? Why isn’t objective duty something normal, what is the issue in the tissue?
On Spirituality and Technology
One may know and understand the open-source framework of Vipassana, but there is a deep spectrum of experience which makes it genuine, real. For this it will be mentioned here that a school is necessary for the adequate conditions which transmute theory and philosophy into living wisdom.
Questions to Ask Oneself
What is my experience of life and why is this significant?
What am I?
What is my experience of the body and the mind?
Where do I have the most difficulty in my experience of life?
How do I suffer?
Birth, old age, sickness, death.
Sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, distress.
Association with unlikeable, disassociation with likeable.
Not getting desirable.
Human suffering is universal to all human beings.
If there is suffering then somewhere a sensation has given rise to craving and thought.
On Truth
The observation of sensations offers the only means to examine the totality of our being. This increases clarity of meaning.
Try feeling sensations with your body. This is not possible. Only the mind can feel sensations. The contents of mind also manifest as sensations. Every contact between the human being and outer world is at the body level. Yet it is the mind that senses.
The elements observable in human experience through sensations are earth (weight), air (movement), water (cohesion, yielding), fire (heat/cold), space. These are the smallest particles that the mind can sense as they arise, persist and pass away.
This is the essential taste of experience at the deepest level of the mind: impermanence.
It is essential to understand equanimity based on the experience of impermanence. Constant thorough understanding of impermanence without reaction is experiential knowledge of reality. As it is. Both sense door sphere and outside world sense object are impermanent. The depth of this experience is liberation.
Theory
The right effort in the observation of sensations offers the experience of the arising of suffering through the sense door spheres as they relate to the outside world sense objects: eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch, mind.
For example:
Eye →
eye object (ANYTHING enticing and pleasurable to this sense) →
eye consciousness →
eye contact →
|| EXPERIENTIAL EVENT HORIZON where mind meets matter in the human design || sensation →
perception (cognition) →
mental reaction (recognition) →
craving →
thought conception →
rolling in thoughts of eye objects.
Ear → (similar process)
Nose → (similar process)
Tongue → (similar process)
Body → (similar process)
Mind → contents of mind → mind consciousness → mind contact → || EXPERIENTIAL EVENT HORIZON || sensation from mind contact → perception of mental contents → mental reaction to mind objects, mental contents → craving after mind objects, mental contents → thought conception of mind objects, mental contents → rolling in the thoughts of mind objects.
The source of this sequence is a transmission of wisdom from antiquity. It is the view of reality by a maturing human being.
When a sensation is observed by direct experience with a developed awareness and understanding of impermanence →
then the source of suffering gets eradicated →
because no reaction and no craving is produced (in chain) →
at the deepest subconscious level where mind and matter meet →
which is purification on the path of truth →
for realizing a quality of being beyond senses in this life.
Practice
To experience sensations properly there is a practical method of observing the body with its sensations and the mind with its mental contents.
For the purification, overcoming of sorrow, extinguishing of suffering and walking the path of truth and realization with ardent meditative awareness: constant thorough (equanimous without reaction) understanding (direct personal experience of the knowledge of the sequence of interaction of sense door spheres with sense world objects) of impermanence (of arising, persistence and ceasing).
Observe the BODY → respiration and the whole body.
Positions with their postures: sitting, standing, lying, walking. Also: seasons, nutrition.
→ observe SENSATIONS: pleasant or unpleasant or neither: neutral. Each comes with or without attachment. With attachment means with flesh, material, sensual. Without attachment means without flesh, pure, immaterial, non-sensual.
Observe the MIND → the type and state.
Reactive: (craving, aversion, delusion) or free from; Collected or scattered (due to five hindrances); Expanded (advanced beyond) or unexpanded (ordinary); Surpassable (mundane) or unsurpassable; Concentrated or unconcentrated (not near absorption); Freed or not freed.
→ observe MENTAL CONTENTS: pleasant or unpleasant.
Might be hindrances: sense desire, aversions, sloth and torpor, agitation and remorse, doubt. Observe the process: absence to arising to presence… and how it gets eradicated (no longer arises in future).
Whenever in the world of mind and matter there is something enticing and pleasurable, there this craving arises and gets established in each of the sense door spheres.
The clarity of meaning
Right understanding: understanding of suffering: arising and path to cessation;
Right thought;
Right speech;
Right action;
Right livelihood;
Right effort {prevent, eradicate, develop, maintain} :: generate will → make strong effort → stir up energy → apply mind → strive;
Right awareness: dwell ardent with awareness and constant thorough understanding of impermanence observing the direct personal experience of body and sensations, mind and mental contents;
Right concentration: detached from craving and unwholesome mental states. This is a first absorption: born of detachment, accompanied by initial and sustained application of the mind, filed with rapture and bliss. Treasure.
