Many in our
sangha follow the Theravada tradition which practices vipassana (or insight
meditation.)  I recently read a helpful article by Buddhist scholar Reginald Ray in which he
defines the word vipassana.

Ray states that the word has two parts:  Passana, which indicates seeing and Vi, which when used as a prefex adds the meaning of extraordinary. Thus vipassana
means “seeing in an extraordinary way.”  It means to see things as they
truly are – without making things/life the way we want them to be. Just clear
awareness of Reality.

I agree with Ray that there are three important features to the experience of
vipassana.  (Note the word experience
is used and not intellectual understanding.) One is that insight arrives
suddenly and unexpectedly, cutting through discursive thinking or any
sensation. It arrives as a complete shock.   

Also, it is an experience of something. Yet it is an experience that is
outside the perspective of ego and duality. After the insight, the mind
will try to use words to describe what happened – but they just point to the experience.

Finally, vipassana is an experience in which there is seeing but no
seer. Nothing changes but the perspective of seeing without a self.

Sounds pretty
strange!  Unknowable? Useless? It takes
commitment and a powerful experience to get the mind; attention of Reality as
it is.  In Theravada, vipassana is seeing clearly all phenomena of
both the outer (physical) and the inner (psychological) worlds as impermanent,
insubstantial and painful.  In vipassana, we experience how anything that
appears does so because it is based on an infinite number of causes and
conditions – without any real existence or identity of its own.  This
is what the Buddha taught as Reality.

So we sit regularly until the mind eventually arrives at a point of relative
openness and calm.  Then, within that state of peace one seeks through the
practice of vipassana, insight into the very essence of what is can appear.
Insight meditation is the practice of learning the true nature of Reality.

– Mary MacGregor