the third training.

I will leave off describing the high concentration attainments until Part III so as to keep this section focused on the essential skills necessary for meditation, as once you gain access concentration getting into those states is very easy. Until you can get into access concentration, you ain’t got squat. Thus, pick an object, practice well and often, learn to attain to access concentration, finish reading this book, and by that point everything should be very straightforward.

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Concentration, The Second TrainingMorality, The First and Last Training

Now, it must be said that concentration practices, like all practices, have their shadow sides. For instance, high and unusual experiences can become addictive and seductive, causing them to receive more attention and focus than they deserve. They can also lead to people becoming very otherworldly and ungrounded, very much the way that

hallucinogens can. They can also bring up lots of our psychological

“stuff.” This last limitation could be a benefit if we are in a mood to deal with this stuff. Perhaps the most important limitations of concentration practices is that they do not lead directly to the insights and permanent understandings that come from training in wisdom, as much as we might like them to. That brings us to the third training…

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4.WISDOM, THE THIRD TRAINING

The third training in the list is wisdom, in this case a very special kind of wisdom that I will often call “ultimate” or “fundamental”

wisdom. This may also be rendered as “understanding” or “insight.”

The whole trick to this training is to understand the truth of the sensations that make up our present experience. The great mystics from all traditions have reported that there is something remarkable and even enlightening about our ordinary experiences if we take the time to look into them very carefully. Those that undertake training in wisdom have decided to do the experiment and see for themselves if this is true or if those old dead dudes were just making it all up.

Obviously, the first assumption that must be made is that there is some understanding that is completely beyond any ordinary

understanding, even beyond the altered states of consciousness that can be attained if we train in concentration. The next assumption is that there are specific practices that can lead to that understanding if we simply do them. The third and perhaps most vital assumption is that we can do them and be successful.

The assumption that is rarely stated explicitly but often implied is that we must be willing to stay on a sensate level, at the level of the actual sensations that make up experiences, if we wish to gain the insights that are promised by the mystics. The corollary of this assumption is that we must be willing to set aside periods of time during which we abandon the ordinary way of working in the world that is called training in morality and even the unusual way of working with altered states of consciousness that is called training in concentration.