NBEF Cause-Condition-Phenomenon-Response Observation Practice: A Deeper Explanation

Last week, I briefly introduced NBEF’s Cause-Condition-Phenomenon Insight practice. Today, I would like to explain more fully how this practice applies the principle of dependent origination to everyday life, particularly how we observe the conditions from which a phenomenon arises without establishing “I,” “me,” or “someone” within it.

NBEF’s Cause-Condition-Phenomenon-Response Observation Practice is a practical meditation method designed to develop experiential wisdom and insight by directly observing the principle of dependent origination in everyday life.

In NBEF practice, the five aggregates, namely the body and mind, are regarded as the fundamental basis upon which all experience can arise. Based on the five aggregates, when one of the six sense faculties encounters its corresponding object, the appropriate consciousness arises. The coming together of the sense faculty, the object, and consciousness is contact. With contact as condition, feeling and various other phenomena arise.

When a phenomenon arises in the body or mind, the practitioner does not ask, “Who did this?” or “Why did this happen to me?” Instead, the practitioner examines, “What conditions caused this phenomenon to arise?” The practitioner then observes how the mind responds to that phenomenon.

In SN 12.12, when a practitioner asks, “Who makes contact?”, “Who feels?”, “Who craves?”, and “Who clings?”, the Buddha explains that these questions are not properly framed. Instead, one should understand that with the six sense bases as condition, contact arises; with contact as condition, feeling arises; with feeling as condition, craving arises; and with craving as condition, clinging arises.

Therefore, the practitioner does not grasp the experience as “I did this” or “Someone did this to me.” Instead, one observes, “With these causes and conditions, this phenomenon arose, and the mind responded in this way.” This does not deny ethical responsibility for one’s actions. Rather, it means examining the conditions and the mind’s response correctly without establishing a fixed self within the experience.

Without mindfulness and wisdom, we may grasp an arisen phenomenon as “I” or “mine,” leading to responses rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion. With mindfulness and wisdom, however, we recognize that the phenomenon arose dependent upon causes and conditions. We are then less likely to be carried away by greed, hatred, and delusion and can respond with wholesome qualities such as loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

The purpose of this practice is not merely to analyze causes, conditions, phenomena, and responses intellectually. It is to directly realize impermanence, suffering, and non-self by repeatedly observing the arising and ceasing of phenomena and the mind’s responses to them. It also develops an experiential understanding of which conditions lead to unwholesome responses and painful results, and which conditions lead to wholesome responses and peaceful results.

As these observations accumulate, we naturally realize that to change a result, we must change the conditions that produce it.

This method is not a new doctrine intended to replace dependent origination as taught in the early discourses. It is NBEF’s original and practical meditation model, designed to help practitioners directly observe and realize the arising and cessation of suffering in everyday life.

This observation of dependent origination is not a practice that can be properly undertaken through intellectual analysis alone. The Five Precepts must be firmly established, and the Noble Eightfold Path, particularly right view, right intention, right speech, right action, and right livelihood, must provide its foundation.

Reference: The Connected Discourses on Causation (SN 12), particularly SN 12.12