The “Masculine” and “Feminine” Path to Awakening
Q: Meditating on the empty space in the head is very intriguing…
A: It’s just putting your attention on the space between and around thoughts or sensations. Focus on the background of experience.
But that’s just a stepping stone to nonduality, ultimately even the breath, thoughts, and sensations (form) are empty and there’s no distinction between background and foreground all is made of “awareness”. Emptiness is none other than form. Nirvana is none other than Samsara.
The key is to get your mind concentrated enough to deconstruct form from a macroscopic lens to a microscopic lens and see how one slab of sensation (breath, feet, a word, sense of self) is actually made up of infinite numbers of empty pixels rapidly arising and passing and experiencing it again and again until you rewire the brain and the insight is seeped into the cellular level. That’s #Vipassana in a nutshell.
Q: Sounds badass as fuck actually.
A: It’s very masculine and hardcore. It’s like the gym. I didn’t start doing the Do Nothing surrendering/expansion-type practice until I got really good at Vipassana. One is more masculine and the other feminine. Yin and Yang.
Some people like you start with more surrendering type practice.
Then work their way into Vipassana and contraction.
So you go from pure contraction of Vipasanna to Vipashayna, which is doing Vipasanna from the non-dual perspective, combining contraction with expansion, and then full-on Do Nothing where you just let go of any effort to meditate.
That’s the entire spectrum.
Q: It’s cool that it can be seen that these two practices lead to the same destination.
A: They feed on each other. Even psychedelics. If you do those practices you will get more out of your trips. Self-inquiry too.
Q: I met with Daniel Ingram on Zoom a while ago and remember him saying reality is essentially many many minuscule sensations occurring in one moment over and over again.
A: Even the sequence of time and space is just sensations arising and passing.