Vipassana teaching puts so much emphasis on mindfulness that some people use the two terms interchangeably. But the distinction is important. Mindfulness meditation is a technique you can use for various purposes, beginning with simple stress reduction. But if you are doing mindfulness meditation within a traditional Vipassana framework, the ultimate purpose is more ambitious: to gain insight. And not just insight in the everyday sense of understanding some new stuff. The idea is to see the true nature of reality, and Buddhist texts going back more than a millennium spell out what that means.
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