Is Critical Thinking Active Vipassana?

[kirk5a]

Thanks Daniel, there is a lot of great information there. However, given what is plain from that reading material, that papañca is something very deeply rooted in the mind, I think the argument that "actively disputing your irrational beliefs, reduces and possibly eliminates papañca" remains thin. Particularly, since the elimination of papañca is the domain of the arahant.

Recognizing and disputing one's own irrational beliefs surely is a beneficial practice. However, is it within the sphere of the "supramundane" (lokuttara) or "mundane" (lokiya)? Now unless the proponents of critical thinking are saying their methods result in the levels of awakening, not just enhanced psychological well-being, then, it is "mundane."

This is relevant here because "vipassana" is the seeing connected with the "supramundane."

One simile, for instance (SN 35.204), compares samatha and vipassana to a swift pair of messengers who enter the citadel of the body via the noble eightfold path and present their accurate report — Unbinding, or nibbana — to the consciousness acting as the citadel's commander.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... etool.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Cittasanto]

Maybe we need to clarify what is understood by "vipassana"?

I would say in a general manner used today "a techneque which promotes the arising of Pañña" or "the setting down of delusion"

I don't see vipassana as a "technique" but more as a function. The difference being that a technique is something that can be improved upon or refined (like critical thinking) where vipassana is what it is.

Are you looking for clarity for the purpose of discourse in this thread or to discus what vipassana is?

[Cittasanto]

please read the post right above the initial reply to you!

Although Venerable dealt with Vipasana here, he only gave a quick look and I did not see this part you quote relevant in my response other than to point out that the OP had been edited for clarity. but this quote can also be seen as describing the type I am suggesting.
Critical thinking is not about doubt but seeing flaws and/or perfections in views ... something already mentioned within the thread.

What about papañca, as I raised in my first post, and about which Ven. Pesala agreed? Why have you not addressed that point which I raised on page 1? Is it inconvenient for your view? Did you do some research on papañca before you replied to me? All you did was ask a question in response (what if it resulted in dispassion; being unfettered;...?) and didn't provide any explanation of how critcial thinking avoids papañca at all.

It's easy to say "it's not about doubting or speculation." But how does critical thinking escape the grip of papañca (mental proliferation/objectification)? As in the following:

"Dependent on intellect & ideas, intellect-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as a requisite condition, there is feeling. What one feels, one perceives (labels in the mind). What one perceives, one thinks about. What one thinks about, one objectifies. Based on what a person objectifies, the perceptions & categories of objectification assail him/her with regard to past, present, & future ideas cognizable via the intellect.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Cittasanto]

I am curious as to what you mean with the underlined (emphasis added) part?
although I would argue that part of the benefit critical thinking has is to know when to stop thinking about something.

I wonder about the intention behind the mental effort of critical thinking. Isn't that intention an important aspect of ascertaining the usefulness of the tool? Critical thinking can be bent to speculative philosophy or debate just as much as it can be bent to food production, or social governance, or parsing bhavana modalities.

In general it functions as a corrective for superstitions, logical fallacies, unexamined premises, and other lazy heuristics. This corrective is a wide-ranging benefit, and given our cultural and temporal remove from the days of the early Sangha it's quite useful when exploring these issues with the intention of better understanding the Dhamma and its context.

I think it's a heady game, however, and somewhat at a remove from the embodied practice we are enjoined to engage in. It isn't an unwholesome obstacle, but continual thinking is exhausting...

[daverupa]

I am curious as to what you mean with

parsing bhavana modalities

"Parse" means to analyze into component parts while describing the roles played by these parts; parsing a sentence yields nouns, verbs, clauses, etc., so parsing bhavana modalities means examining them with an eye to understanding their composition, what sorts of assertions they rely on, how various aspects work together to facilitate goals, and so forth.

[Mr Man]

Are you looking for clarity for the purpose of discourse in this thread or to discus what vipassana is?

Given the title of the thread I would think that it would be esential to have an understanding of what vipassana is and what it isn't. What if the whole discussion was based on a incorrect understanding of a key term?

If we take the definition of vipassana from kirk5a above " "vipassana" is the seeing connected with the "supramundane." and critical thinking as " "analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improoving it" I'm struggling to see how the two could be confused.

[kirk5a]

please read the post right above the initial reply to you!

What post are you referring to?

[danieLion]

But it does have practical applications in terms of active vipassana and dhamma practice in general.

Is there such a thing as "active vipassana"? danieLion I'd be interested in hearing what your understanding of "vipassana" is?

I mostly agree with what Thanissaro says in One Tool Among Many The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice and basically agree with what Cittasanto has said in this thread about active vipassana. I also feel that the modern Vipassana Meditation Movement has now convoluted the early Buddhist meaning of the term much in the same way the Mindfulness Practice Movement has co-opted the sati. For more on this (I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a good overview) see Gil Frondal's Insight Meditation in the United States: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

[danieLion]

But it does have practical applications in terms of active vipassana and dhamma practice in general.

Is there such a thing as "active vipassana"?

To quote Sayadaw U Tejaniya, "Vipassana is not sitting still." (it's in one of his Dharma Talks on Audio Dharma).

[Mr Man]

But it does have practical applications in terms of active vipassana and dhamma practice in general.

Is there such a thing as "active vipassana"? danieLion I'd be interested in hearing what your understanding of "vipassana" is?

I mostly agree with what Thanissaro says in One Tool Among Many The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice

Hi danieLion
to quote from Ven. Thanissaos piece "So, to answer the question with which we began: Vipassana is not a meditation technique. It's a quality of mind — the ability to see events clearly in the present moment.". So would you agree that vipassana is not a technique?

Maybe the OP should be "Can critical thinking give rise to vipassana?"

[danieLion]

Thanks Daniel, there is a lot of great information there. However, given what is plain from that reading material, that papañca is something very deeply rooted in the mind, I think the argument that "actively disputing your irrational beliefs, reduces and possibly eliminates papañca" remains thin. Particularly, since the elimination of papañca is the domain of the arahant.

Recognizing and disputing one's own irrational beliefs surely is a beneficial practice. However, is it within the sphere of the "supramundane" (lokuttara) or "mundane" (lokiya)? Now unless the proponents of critical thinking are saying their methods result in the levels of awakening, not just enhanced psychological well-being, then, it is "mundane."

This is relevant here because "vipassana" is the seeing connected with the "supramundane."

One simile, for instance (SN 35.204), compares samatha and vipassana to a swift pair of messengers who enter the citadel of the body via the noble eightfold path and present their accurate report — Unbinding, or nibbana — to the consciousness acting as the citadel's commander.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... etool.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's difficult to make a case that the the mundane/suprmundane distinction is a hard one (I'm sure you're aware of the threads here on that very isssue). Re-read the last paragraph from the Bhikkhu Ninoslav Ñāṇamoli article I cited above, where he uses terminology indicative of a "gradual path" and implies that these processes occur more along the lines of a continuum than along the lines of a sharp dichotomy.

For instance, we find arhants and the Buddha in the suttas and vinaya making mistakes, and we find the Buddha changing his mind on several occasions after he realized nibbana. This suggests that critical thinking is still necessary for even arhants and Buddhas. This goes to what REBT and CBT calls "perfectionism." Nobody's perfect, not even arhants and Buddha's. If this were not the case, we would see only superhuman Buddhas and superhuman arrhants in the texts who have no need to ever change their minds or behaviors about anything. Of course, many Buddhists want to elevate the Buddha and arhants beyond his humanness and worship him as such. This, however, is neither warranted by the texts nor is it compatible with the experiences of my own practice.

I presume you and I are technically operating in the "mundane" realm, yet we are practicing all the while, including engaging in dhamma discussion and debate in this and other threads. Do we never leave the "mundane" realm and enter the "mundane"? Do we not, perhaps, have moments when we are "tasting" the "supramundane"? And are we at least not striving to approximate it? Is this not implied in phrases like "entering the stream" or even in descriptions of practitioners as "faith followesr" and "dhamma followers"?

Furthermore, you've not addressed the challenges I made that papanca is defined in a clear enough way to be as relevant to your perspective as you want it to be. I have admitted that papanca plays at least a minimal role in understanding the relationship of cognition, intellect, logic, and reason to Buddhist practice. However, I have also tried to show that it, like most if not all concepts, has limited usefulness. You claim it is plain from the reading material (I presume you mean the citations I made) that REBT and CBT as papanca reducers or eradicators is "thin." This makes me wonder how thoroughly you read my post. Furthermore, enhanced psychological well-being in not mutually exclusive from "mundane" or "supramundane" Buddhist practices. I have addressed this with my comments and references to how teleology relates to these matters. Was I not explict enough? Please let me know, and I'll do my best to clarify. I await your response.

[tiltbillings]

. . .

You are not really answering Kirk's point as to the depth and irrationality of the greed, hatred, and delusion with which we are faced. No doubt the techniques you are advocating are effective to a certain level, but I have not seen anything in what you have said here that even remotely suggests that they are capable of addressing something as primal as what the Buddha said are having to deal with as unawakened beings.

[danieLion]

Hi danieLion
to quote from Ven. Thanissaos piece "So, to answer the question with which we began: Vipassana is not a meditation technique. It's a quality of mind — the ability to see events clearly in the present moment.". So would you agree that vipassana is not a technique?

Maybe the OP should be "Can critical thinking give rise to vipassana?"

I said I mostly agree with Thanissaro. One of my goals in participating in this thread is explore just how valid dichotomizing vipassana as a technique verus a quality of mind really is (I'm aware of the other threads here on that very topic). robertk (and another Abhidhamma fanatic I know personally) got me thinking about this. Unless I've misunderstood robertk, Abhidhamma is "active vipassana." But again, I'm exploring these things as a critical thinker--that is, not rushing to judgments and keeping an open mind when I encounter new information--not as someone dug in to a position.

I've also been influenced by Andrea Fella's Daily Life Practice teachings (she's a student of U Tejaniya). This is somewhat bitter-sweet for me, as I've also been influenced by Thanissaro's views on daily life practice. Andrea frequently refers to him as another of her teachers, but she also teaches Mindfulness in ways that fall under the criticisms Thanissaro has recently made in his book Right Mindfulness.

As far as what the OP should or should not be, I'll leave that to Cittasanto, as he started this thread.

[danieLion]

. . .

You are not really answering Kirk's point as to the depth and irrationality of the greed, hatred, and delusion with which we are faced. No doubt the techniques you are advocating are effective to a certain level, but I have not seen anything in what you have said here that even remotely suggests that they are capable of addressing something as primal as what the Buddha said are having to deal with as unawakened beings.

Perhaps you should look over my posts here (especially my earlier ones where I cite a few Albert Ellis documents) again because I have done a very thorough job of answering Kirk's "point" (which isn't as clear as you make it out.) Second of all, I have specifically dealt with the depth and irrationalitty of the greed, hate and delusion we are faced with in my dialogue with Nana. For instance:

• And what, monks, is the unproliferated (nippapañca)? The elimination of passion, the elimination of aggression, the elimination of delusion: this is called the unproliferated.

HI Nana,
REBT and CBT are some of the best tools I've found for rooting out greed/passion, hate/agression, ignorance/delusion. Put differently, they are one of the best tools I've found to reduce papanca. When applied diligently and consistently, they steady, calm and still my mind. They also increase brahmavihara mental states. To me, they are very close to what critical thinking as defined in the OP looks like when combined with Buddhist teleology. Even the notion of learning to think better or improving thinking alone (again, from the OP) implies skillfulness over unskillfulness as it invokes the need for a teleological standard to assess one's progress by. The passage I quoted in my last post from Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought supports all of this.

[Mr Man]

I said I mostly agree with Thanissaro. One of my goals in participating in this thread is explore just how valid dichotomizing vipassana as a technique verus a quality of mind really is (I'm aware of the other threads here on that very topic). robertk (and another Abhidhamma fanatic I know personally) got me thinking about this. Unless I've misunderstood robertk, Abhidhamma is "active vipassana." But again, I'm exploring these things as a critical thinker--that is, not rushing to judgments and keeping an open mind when I encounter new information--not as someone dug in to a position.

Hopefully we are all exploring together.

As far as what the OP should or should not be, I'll leave that to Cittasanto, as he started this thread.

That was not intended to be taken literally but more as to add to the exploration or to change the perspective slightly.