This is a classification of expressions of view, practice, and state. I'm explaining this to help you contemplate it. The most important point is that we have three main ways of knowing the world:
1.Inferential cognition through thinking. Sometimes, it also involves direct perception.
2. Cognition through practice, which isn't inferential or thought-based. Experiencing things as dream-like is practice, not just accumulating knowledge without applying them.
3. Cognition of states, which involves direct perception and non-valid cognition, but not inference. Non-valid state cognition is misidentification and should be abandoned, while true states are absolute direct perception and ultimate cognition.
The sad thing is that many people spend years in confusion. If you understand these three types of expressions, you won't waste time. First, learn Buddhist views. Then, using your senses and through practice guided by these views, gradually understand your mind and the external world. For example, mentally negate things by visualizing firing laser beams through them to truly experience their illusory nature.
When your mind believes the external world is illusory, what happens? Since it's illusory, we let it go and start practicing. We know we don't need to develop science. Science endlessly investigates whether things are quantum or particles, light or particles, wave-particle duality, and still can't figure it out. A practitioner thinks: whether you're light or particles, you're false, so abandon unnecessary struggles.
Then turn inward to recognize the mind: without renunciation, there are many afflictions; without bodhicitta, there's selfishness; without the correct view of emptiness, there's deep self-grasping. Gradually work on these and things become clear.
When you turn inward, you'll encounter various situations and obstacles. Many practice experiences arise, and expressing these is what we call expressions of practice.
When you fully understand through practice, that's a state of realization. Of course, there are non-ultimate states, like experiences of mere emptiness, and mistaken states where one mistakenly believes they've realized. Sometimes these mistaken states are so strong that it is very hard to let them go. Expressions of state are purely direct perception, possibly non-valid cognition, but not inferential.These three types of expressions are actually expressions of three ways of knowing.
Overall, Buddhist practice involves first establishing views through study and contemplation, then transforming these into practice through dedicated methods and techniques, and finally achieving states. In other words, use views to develop practice and achieve states.
Excerpted from: Cognition and Expression Part Three
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