Meditation practice engages our awareness in participatory observation. We are part of the witnessing process- simply watching objectively and openly the inner workings of our own mind and body over and over again. With time and discipline, our mind can become calm, stable, concentrated, and steady. It is in this state of calm, and with this steady concentration that we gain insight into our own intentions, dispositions, and behaviors. Relaxed and attuned, the open awareness and free attention of our mindsight can become sharply refined- piercing and penetrating even the subtleties of the mind’s activities.

Looking into and seeing with precision, we can pierce through what is observed to perceive the most fundamental reality of what is examined. Mindsight is the culmination of this precise and penetrating capacity for clear & illuminated seeing from within. With this skillfulness, there arises the potential for deeper insight, fuller understanding, and more discerning awareness. Through this mindsight, we dive directly into reality itself- training and cultivating the power of mindfulness to focus in “seeing” without the filter of streaming thought and concept. It operates like a purely reflective lens, and we come to know reality empirically without illusion or projection of mind.

Sharpening mindsight, we tune into the dynamic flow of conditioned arisings in awareness. We transcend our objectified and habitual way of mentally experiencing things… stimulus— mental/objectified representations— and affective reactions to the objectified. We dial in the ‘links’ that instigate our cyclical chains. Quite simply, mindsight is a way of seeing that can short-circuit this cognitive-emotive mechanism before it carries our attention away from the direct experience arising in awareness. We view our reaction to stimuli with calmness, clarity, and precision as we remain serenely detached from the unfolding of our own perceptual process. Refined mindsight conditions a material shift in our perceptual mechanism and emancipates us from the obsessive nature of our thought streams.

As we continue to cultivate and refine our mindsight, we become more sensitive to our inner longing to wake up and to gain liberating insight into the ever-changing dynamic of the reality before us. The more we sit and purposefully attend, the more refined our mindsight becomes in seeing, recognizing, understanding, and discerning the true quality of our impulses, intentions, thoughts, and emotions. A sharpened mindsight helps to free us from the discursive patterns of mind. As it continues to evolve its penetrative and illuminative qualities, so does our capacity for clearer, non-conceptual perception. It is this “clear seeing” and “penetrative insight” that has the power to fundamentally transform our Way of being and living. We are enslaved less by our dramas of thought and feeling and guided more by the clear perception and insight spawned from our direct experience. It is this sharpened mindsight resulting from directly and repetitively experiencing the activities of mind that seed our confidence to trust a process that arises and unfolds with the reflected intent of the “observer”- to wake up and connect to the “truth” of reality and the “essence” of what it means to be a human being.

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