The First Two Debunkings for Correcting Dualistic Sensory Misperception
This first of a series of two posts overviews the phenomenological results of two phases of “debunking” self-other dualistic sensory misperception. This post covers the jhana and vipassana level of practice, and then the opening of “knowingness” (Rigpa) by way of the Great Seal (Mahamudra) tradition. A subsequent post will cover refinement by way of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) tradition.
Before trying to understand either post, you should read the preface, as well as the Axis Mundi Curriculum Overview, which includes a simpler “laundry list” of attainments, recognitions, and realization.
Overview of Two Debunkings
One way of overviewing the path of insight delineated by my book considers each major level of practice as problematizing the practitioner’s previous perceptual baseline experience. Under this schema, the progressive path entails a series of views, or frameworks taken as working hypotheses about reality. Each view expands on and partly debunks the previous view.
The three columns of Figure 1 summarize progress along the path of insight for each of the three fundamental facets of reality that we work with in meditation: time, space, and cognition. The three rows of Figure 1 summarize the practitioner’s perceptual level of practice and attainment: default human perception (Row 1), Ordinary Special Insight (Row 2), and Extraordinary Special Insight (Row 3). This progression from Row 1 to Row 3 is the highest-level summary of gains that end fundamental suffering.
Figure 1. Overview of Two Levels of Debunking Prior Views
Figure notes. Throughout the two paths of insight—both ordinary and extraordinary—three aspects of perceptual reality govern: time, space, and cognition. Debunking 1, which requires the practitioner’s capacity for mindfulness, or metacognition, is the Ordinary Special Insight level of Buddhist practice. It involves “investigation” of sensory percepts until their default Three Illusions are seen through. When they are seen through often enough in meditation, then eventually three truths cannot be unseen—that permanence is actually utter transience, that the self is actually an unfindable conceptual overlay on no self, and satisfaction is actually the compulsive restlessness of the attentional system and therefore fundamental all-pervasive suffering.
Debunking 2 denotes the Extraordinary Special Insight level of practice, which deconstructs the three negations involved in conditioned and causal reality, revealing the truth of a higher view than that of the Three Characteristics. That higher view is of the unconditioned, unborn, deathless. The transience dimension is no longer fundamentally a linear succession of arisings and passings, but is instead the all-at-onceness of the infinite variety of reality’s expressions (Manifold). Likewise, on the no self dimension, the practitioner, having disidentified from the body’s core as a felt sense of self, now orients to space as one matrix-like omnipervasive openness (Mother). Finally, the suffering of the compulsively moving, grasping and clinging mind gives way to the practitioner’s recognition (Infant) of the Mother as the radical openness of all previously misperceived boundaries. The lucidity of the practitioner’s recognition (Infant) elicits the luminosity, or radiance, of the Mother. When this recognition dawns, knowing is no longer merely the purview of an isolated, bound self, but instead is always already everywhere. As this seminal recognition stabilizes into realization, the practitioner’s application of mindfulness yields to unmediated knowingness.
Ordinary Special Insight
In the first two rows of Figure 1, Debunking 1 defines the Ordinary Special Insight level of practice, in which the practitioner, using mindfulness, or metacognition, investigates illusory permanence, illusory self-structure, and illusory satisfaction of objects and objectives. During the practitioner’s meditations, these Three Illusions deconstruct, revealing the true view of conditioned phenomena:
Nothing lasts any time at all (transience).
No self or any other isolates can be found (no self).
No apprehended object, or objective, stills or satisfies ever-moving attention (suffering).
Because the revealed truth of these Three Characteristics of Conditioned Existence is not what most of us find reassuring, this level of awakening effects a deep renunciation of conditioned existence as such. Nevertheless, it also shifts the practitioner’s baseline dualistic perception in ways that are nondual, immensely fulfilling, and the confident basis of the next level of practice.
Extraordinary Special Insight
Debunking 2 comprises the Extraordinary Special Insight level of practice. In deconstructing the conditioned Three Characteristics of transience, no self, and suffering, this level of practice opens unconditioned being, articulated in terms of Great Perfection view as three unbound aspects of reality:
The Manifold (tsal)
The Mother (Kunzhi)
The Infant (Rigpa)
In this way, the previous negation of our default isolated self-existents becomes cosmological-scale positives: The Mother is more positively sensed as the spacelike essence of all-as-empty. Likewise positive, the Infant begins as the practitioner’s lucid and joyous recognition of the Mother as all-empty essence, which is paradoxically essencelessness. The practitioner’s recognition of the Mother “elicits” her “responsive” luminous knowing, by which everything is always already “aware where it is.”
In early practice, the Manifold—often translated from tsal as energy, manifestation, or dynamism—is associated with motion, time, and change. But at this later level of Mahamudra practice, it indicates not the passing away of particulars driven by time, but, more positively, the infinite variety of all expressed appearances at once.
At this Extraordinary Special Insight level of practice, with methods unique to the Great Seal and Great Perfection traditions, time and therefore causality dissolve into timeless awareness, or “knowingness.” Specifically, timeless knowingness is knowledge of the Mother, which is the single “taste” of everything as empty of an underlying essence, or substratum. When these openings are stable, then Unbounded Wholeness has been gained.
After Unbounded Wholeness has been gained, the practitioner proceeds with refinement, which includes a third phase of partly debunking the previous level of opening. For an overview of that phase, see the third debunking.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.