As with most of the Dhamma essays I’ve written, along with essays on martial arts practices in the past, I concern myself with the middling practitioners as beginners today have a great plenty of resources to consult and learn from and advanced practitioners are well on their way on mostly self-directed practices, perhaps with occasional nudgings by masters. I write so for fellow practitioners with a “little dust in their eyes”, as I came into contact with the Dhamma under similar circumstances. I hope this can be of use, if not --
In Dhamma practice, we are reminded by Gotama Buddha to refrain from prediction and fortune telling. The reason for this is due to the complex interaction between causes and conditions. The mind may be aware of a certain conception that alludes to something in the future, maybe something as simple as, “it would have been nice if someone called,” however due to conditions, perception’s conceptualizations may not really be accurately presenting what really would come to be.
As we practice meditative equipoise, the faculty of perception becomes more and more trained, more powerful and assists wisdom in offering a view of reality as it really is. This wisdom can then be applied to daily activities with mindfulness to “prevent falling into nascent states”. However, as a result of this increasingly powerful faculty of perception, the conceptions become more and more “realistic”, of course reaching to a state of “overlapping” of sense. We must be careful not to fall into the temptation to lead the mind on wild goose-chases on the vividness and seemingly realistic, accurate presentations of this advanced stage of perceptive ability.
To borrow from the scientific world, it is as Benoit Mandlebrot discovered when running weather simulations at International Business Machines (IBM). One small deviation can lead to wildly different results as the simulation continues, in fact a phrase was penned, “a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can affect the weather in Central Park”. Much in the same way, our brain which is offering the faculty of perception, feeds into itself, like the oceans and weather currents, like space itself. The brain’s perceptive capability can run rapid sequences of associative and predictive relations, resulting in a concept of the future. The further into the future, the more the deviation may manifest. This is no different than discoveries that led to a Chaos Theory.
Knowing this, we as practitioners must take great care with the perceptive faculty we have the great fortune of experiencing an awareness of. Eventually, when great care is taken, the perceptive capabilities are perfected (bala), wisdom is perfected and perception itself can recollect things outside of the capabilities of conventional life. Just as a scientist may deduce where something came from and where it is going a few seconds ago and a few seconds to come, the mind can do the same and with perfection can make sweeping insights into the causes and conditions linked together over vast spans of time.
Just as the scientist, we must observe, refraining from false deductions especially sensitive to spurious knowledge. Perception must be continually observing, and recollecting accurately what has just happened through the faculty of mindfulness to allow perception its “fertile playground” to make accurate and precise realization come to fruition. Once coming to fruition, it can be proclaimed, “Gate, gate, parasamgate... Bodhi Svaha!”