The given—rarely stated explicitly but often implied—is that we must be willing to stay on a sensate level, at the level of the actual sensations that make up experiences, if we wish to gain the promised insights. The corollary of this premise is that we must be willing to set aside periods of practice time during which we abandon ordinary ways of functioning in the world and even the unusual way of working with skillful altered states of consciousness that belongs to the training in concentration. We proceed from the premise that the teachings on wisdom point to universal truths that can be
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