Five Aspects of the Five Ways - 2 of 4

Each one of the five ways goes back to at least 1.

If not many historical traditions that were developed around the world and not exclusively in the E from Buddhism. But they also link to traditions from other parts of the world. the W Christianity. And so forth because as I say I tend to see the world. Wide contemplative tradition. As a unity. You could look back from the five ways and you could see the whole history of the development of.

Contemplation from its show monic origins through the arising of Civilizations and through the seminal discoveries of the put down, particularly and then the Mahan's sort of merging with Zen and what came out of that and then the Bud Rihanna and then the sort of more non dual approaches all of that is.

Behind it, and we could go I could go into a long tartan have elsewhere as to the rich historical origins of each of the five ways, they have the past.

But they also have I believe a future?

Because.

They represent reworkings of those traditions. I don't claim that these are those traditions. I am attempting to make.

Represent a secular modern approach to these things that the spiritual cloud. I don't want to lose the liberating clap that they can each one of them can lead to classical enlightenment can lead to what I believe is the core spiritual experience.

Of humanity certainly don't want to lose that cultural trappings, doctrinal trappings things that are based on mythology.

I.

On things that.

In our don't seem to have an empirical basis or.

Don't seem probable logically.

I have tried to take that out for better or worse. It's an approach that will work for certain People and not work for other People like all approaches.

Every approach has strengths and weaknesses and that's good because different things work for different People. This is One Direction that a person could take if they wanted to explore? What can be done creatively with the come down to us from the past just one possible way to go.

If you look carefully at the five ways system you'll notice it's all built on binary contrasts.

A binary means 1 on one one on one contrast like black versus white that's a binary contrast.

That's intentional because when you study.

When you do functional image Ng of brain.

Changes.

As the result of whatever meditation or anything else.

You can't actually image, the brain function you can just have 2 contrast in conditions and compare them. So I designed the system to work that way. There's a contrast between tracking ordinary sensory activity.

And tracking corresponding restful states, there's a contrast between intentionally creating feeling positive feel image talk at just observing any at all feel image talk. There's a contrast between working with the subject if somatic visual and auditory experience versus object if somatic visual and auditory experience.

The contrast between relative rest.

Where you're focusing on restful qualities an absolute rest where you do nothing etc, etc, etc?

Anyone of those.

Presents itself as a natural.

Thing that can be studied with the imaging technology. So when I say that the five ways have a future. Hopefully, by that. I mean, they've been set up based on what I know that scientists need.

When they do this kind of research so that it can be easily their effects can be easily researched in subsequent generations.