Practice Process
Yet another way to look at a typical (?) process of practice:
- Content
First, we are fascinated with the specific content of our experiences - sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, experiences of all sorts. - Process
Then, we become more interested in - and gain some insights into - the underlying processes. We see how believing in thoughts create suffering, how resisting experiences creates suffering, how all experiences are fluid and impermanent, how gratitude opens for happiness, how release from identification with content allows for fuller engagement, and so on.
Here, we also gradually become familiar with ourselves as the Witness, as formless awareness. And from this new sense of overview, we gain insight into "no self" in the world of form. The boundary between our human self and the rest of the world of phenomena dissolves and falls away, and we see that it was just created from an abstraction in the first place. This human self arises within space & awareness just like everything else, just like clouds, trees, other humans and so on. It is just a temporary and dynamic pattern in the world of form, a temporary vortex in a stream of matter and energy. It - along with all other patterns in the world of form - has not fixed or independent existence. - Ground
Then, realizing that there is no "I" even as the seeing, we find ourselves as the ground which all phenomena arise from and as. We find ourselves as emptiness (groundless ground) and emptiness dancing (phenomena). We find ourselves as that which is beyond and includes seeing and seen. There is only doing and no doer. There is no "I" anywhere.
Here, we also see how the previous sense of an "I" only came from a belief in an abstraction (a thought, an idea) of an "I" superimposed on segments of what is. Superimposed on this human self, on pure awareness, and so on. The doing was made into a doer. The seeing into a seer. Now, it all seems so flimsy - a house of cards which seemed so real, and had so real effects in terms of certain perceptions and behaviors, and especially in terms of all the suffering created by it.