Beliefs And Inner Experience
Imagine Clarity is designed to support your journey of discovering the mind and its potential. The team often receives detailed practice-related questions, and we are happy to provide carefully considered answers to support your reflections and meditation practice. We will start to highlight some of our answers that might interest everyone! How to respond when we are confronted with information which challenges our beliefs or even our understanding of reality and truth, that is, our worldview?
The impact of our assumptions and how to gain more clarity are widely explored both in our beginner-friendly and more advanced courses. First through reflections and meditations, then inner experience.
The impact of our assumptions and how to gain more clarity are widely explored both in our beginner-friendly and more advanced courses. First through reflections and meditations, then inner experience.
Beginner Friendly
Challenges to our everyday assumptions are considered in Knowing Yourself to Know the World, especially in the practice of Beliefs. The course is part of a comprehensive Meditate Day by Day program where you learn mindfulness methods for approaching all kinds of situations, even the most difficult ones.
A complete consideration of the topic includes reflections on the fundamental role of altruism and caring for others in overcoming our fragmented worldview.
More Experienced Meditators
One may expand on that with Deeper Insight reflections on how to cultivate vipaśyanā into the nature of the mind and world.
Deeper insights are gained first through detailed analysis of consciousness, then through inner experience. —Matthieu Ricard
There are many forms of vipaśyanā or insight meditation. A classical one is the four foundations, or four pillars of mindfulness (known as satipaṭṭhāna in the Pali language). It is to gradually become mindful of our body, our sensations, the workings of the mind, and phenomena at large. Continuity for your reflections and practice in the deeper end of the pool is offered with the complete meditation courses The Four Foundations of Mindfulness and its older cousin, Four Applications of Mindfulness. You are invited to explore these four pillars step by step to explore each theme at your own pace. The aim is that you enter into the experience of insight again and again, saturating the mind on the path of discovery.
What is the nature of the phenomena we call the mind and what populates its domain? Probing closely into the mental space, so central to our very existence, is the close application of mindfulness. —B.A. Wallace
In this context, what do we mean by mindfulness, called smriti in Sanskrit and sati in Pali? The four close applications of mindfulness have been extensively practised for over two thousand years in the Theravadan tradition, from which is the following classic definition by Nagasena:
Mindfulness, when it arises, calls to mind wholesome and unwholesome tendencies, with faults and faultless, inferior and refined, dark and pure together their counterparts...
Mindfulness, when it arises, follows the courses of beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies: these tendencies are beneficial, these unbeneficial; these tendencies are helpful, these unhelpful. Thus one who practices yoga rejects unbeneficial tendencies and cultivates beneficial tendencies.
—Nagasena, Indian Buddhist Monk, 2nd century BCE (Milindapanha 37-38)
Photo: Artwork by Yahne Le Toumelin (1976)
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