The Five Ways - A Contemporary Toolkit for Classical Enlightenment

I like to organize the meditation techniques that I teach to People.

Into what I call the five ways.

Five ways are 5 contrast, ING approaches to the development of concentration sensory clarity and equanimity.

Each of the five ways, is derived from one or several traditions that have existed previously. But what I've done is I've modernized the vocabulary and I have completely illuminated anything that is explicitly religious from it, so that the five ways can be looked upon as a shall we say.

Of a way to bring about a secular paradigm for classical enlightenment.

The five ways are.

Focus in focus out.

Focus on rest focus on change and focus on positive.

Focus in

The end in this case refers to one's innermost experience of thought and emotion. This is derived from the classic discovery of the boat dock.

That if you divide the experience of self into its atomic components, the sense of self as thing and the sense of being trapped.

In selfish thing disappearance, so there are many ways in the Buddhist literature. For sort of doing this divide and conquer on once I am this, I use one that.

Is actually somewhat based on a more front Rihanna POV? But in any event I?

Take as the fundamental elements the somatic component of emotional type body sensation. The visual component of mental imagery. Visual thinking In other words, and the auditory component of internal talked or conversations, so I have People tease apart. The sense of E as controller or E as observer or I as experience are at each had a break it down.

Into these atoms and then this reduces and eventually eliminates.

Self as prison thoughts and emotions as a place. You can't escape from but our constraint, too, so that's the focus in approaches. I say it's essentially based on the one one of the core innovations of the book dot which is this.

Untangle and be free paradigm.

Focus out is based on the Zen way of working now there's a lot of aspects to them, but one of the aspects is.

That, they would have to do their practice as they worked. There was a work ethic in Confucianism that infiltrated into the Zen temples so how are you going to have a deep practice while you're doing physical labor one way to do that is you anchor yourself in the external sites external sounds and physical sensations, so by way of contrast to the field image talk of the subjective world. You could let go of feel image dog let go of the subjective self and.

Anchor yourself in the power of now, as exemplified by touch sight S so I call that focus out. That's really useful for practicing life and it was developed as I say as part of the zend curriculum exactly because they were called upon to do so. Much practice in daily life activities. So we got focus in work with the subject of world feeling in stock. You've got focus out by way of contrast work with the object if world.

Tight sight sound.

Then you have focus on rest, which I've described in some detail in another talk, which is basically my reworking of the whole tranquilizing side of contemplative practice, tranquilizing side of contemplative practice is found all over the world is found in the absorption practices of.

Early Buddhism, but it's also found in the contemplative practices of Christianity Islam Judaism. And so forth technically speaking the word contemplation within the Christian context as 2 meetings, is a synonym for meditation. But it's also a special term for deep states of tranquility that they called the prayer of quiet but at its extreme end.

They called infused contemplation so I've drawn from the whole worlds. Contemplative traditions and specifically the absorption practices of early Buddhism reformulated that in a completely secular vocabulary. Collet focus on rest and that's sort of the tranquil side of the practice.

So that's focusing focus our focus on rest then.

Ordinary.

Subjective experience field image stock ordinary object of experience touch sight sound and these.

More.

Uh.

Special.

Pleasant restful flavors.

All of these experiences are experiences.

And therefore they are of the nature of empty enerji empty. Enerji doesn't sound very appealing. But it's incredibly empowering an fulfilling once you start to experience them that way.

I teach People how to notice how any and all sensory experience changes and also along with that to be aware of the underlying forces that are responsible for that change well by observing change. Both continuous change in the sense of flowing energean. Discontinuous change in the sense of vanishings that gets us in contact with the energycap aspect.

And the

Emptiness.

Which is the essence of that enerji so that whole approach to things which involves impermanence and?

What the Christians called Ken Gnosis the emptying out?

Into the source I call that focus on change, so that's 4th way, and that will tend to deconstruct the something Ness of self.

And the material ality of the external world into a kind of transparent enerji so you could call that kind of.

Dying into the source.

Right if you die you have to be reborn and the whole idea and being reborn is to be reported better not just to be reborn. So then there's something called focus on positive where you actively generate positive content in mental image internal talk emotional feel, and that.

Creates a new self that new self arises from the nothingness as a better something us.

And let's focus on positive and so that taken together, gives a very complete toolkit for classical enlightenment.