{The Flipp6er Blog makes comments about the new Second Life exploration called “Play as Being” (PaB). This first entry begins a series considering six points about PaB that “can’t be right”.}
1a) “The PaB time format cannot be right.”
The group uses a practice format of nine seconds every fifteen minutes, for whatever portions of the day the practitioner can maintain the discipline recommended by the group. But even if someone manages to follow this format for ten hours per day, the actual “formal” practice would total only 6 minutes. This is a negligible amount of time, compared to the several hours a day that would be traditionally recommended.
Someone might claim that the idea here is to encourage a kind of awareness that will persist or pop up more often during the day, adding to the total time spent in appreciative presence. But that same idea applies in the traditional case, and is in fact assumed to be part of what hopefully follows from the “several hours per day requirement”.
Again, it might seem that the idea in PaB is to get maximal efficiency per unit time through frequency of application… that is, by frequently interrupting the ordinary mind, the PaB project is furthered because the approach diminishes the accumulation of ordinary patterns of mind that filter out “Being” … we don’t get very lost this way, so we don’t need much time to “recover.” But that’s also part of the rationale behind traditional practice, with its much higher standards of time involvement, maintaining awareness not only during informal practice sessions but throughout the day and even into sleep. If this latter approach still strains to nurture some kind of significant realization, how can the minimal time format recommended in PaB possibly work?
Conclusion: the “nine second” format is just not enough!
1b) “The claim that PaB’s ‘nine-second’ time format is insufficient, is itself wrong.”
The notion that you need a lot of time in order to practice meditation is profoundly confused. What is emphasized in traditional practice is not spending as much time as possible, but understanding what our typical involvement with time really is, what can and can’t be gained through such an involvement, and how to let go of it. Letting go of the mind’s ordinary heedless onrush is precisely letting go of this involvement with time and with associated heavy-handed notions of vigilance and “practice”. Hence, emphasizing the use of lots of time as an absolute requirement is confused.
Someone might object “fine, but that refinement of understanding would also figure prominently in traditional training too and does take time to learn, even granted that the use of time in itself is not the main issue. So my critique of PaB still stands.” But this is wrong. If “1a)” is going to stand, it first needs to be thoroughly restated and in the process will end up consistent with this new point, “1b)”—we don’t necessarily need lots of time, only as much time as it takes to become aware of our attachment to time. It’s not “more time” per se that aids this awareness, it’s “more awareness”! Even this “more” is part of the problem, since it’s precisely such quantity-oriented language that confuses the issue.
If we are going to appeal to traditional standards of practice, we should also take seriously the point emphasized in higher parts of such traditional training, which seek to take time and practice out of the picture.
Conclusion: the “nine second” format may well be enough, time-wise, or even too much! (“0″ would be better.)
Overall judgment: I think both “can’t be right” claims (1a and 1b), are right within their proper limits of application. It’s hard to be completely wrong.
