Reading Highlight

To some, this second mode of insight practice, where liberating ways of looking are intentionally cultivated and sustained, may initially sound unattractive. This is quite a common reaction, and there are various possible reasons for it. One may involve a belief that ‘being’ and ‘doing’ are really different. Often then, ‘just being’ is regarded as preferable or somehow more authentic. As we will see, however, with the maturing of insight into dependent arising and fabrication one realizes that this perceived dichotomy between ‘being’ and ‘doing’, though it might at first seem and feel self-evident, is in fact essentially mistaken and based on a false impression. It rests on three basic and connected assumptions: 1.   That there actually is an objective reality that we can and should ‘be with’. 2.   That anything other than the awareness ‘simply knowing’ or innocently, naturally ‘receiving’ this ‘reality’ is somehow a laboured and artificially constructed state. 3.   That since a state of ‘being’ is thus assumed to be a state of ‘non-doing’ and so to involve no effort, self will not be constructed there. This is in contrast to states more obviously involving intention, which are assumed to construct self.