Vipassana Time

I am not yet habituated to daily formal meditation, although I practice the self-inquiry practice of sages like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta, and the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen/Mahamudra practice, which can be done in the midst of activity, throughout one’s day. As Ramana teaches, “We must be inwardly quiet, not forgetting the Self, then externally we can go on with our activities.”

I first did a 10-day Vipassana retreat in Japan c.1990, and boy, were my legs in pain for the last nine days! It took a while, but I slowly became able to do 10-day courses without my sensations, thoughts & emotions being overtaken by pain & anger. In the past two years I have done several 10-day (or 21-, and even a 40-day) meditation sessions, at temples in Thailand, and in Vipassana centers outside of Thailand, specifically Nepal.

Vipassana centers offer 20-day and longer courses only to people who have first done at least three 10-day courses, and then a 7-day Satipatthana Sutta (Sutra, Scripture) Course, which follows the same format as a 10-day course, except that the taped discourses in the evening are an examination of the sutra, one of the most widely studied discourses in the Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhism, the foundation for contemporary Vipassana meditation practice. It stresses the practice of sati (mindfulness) “for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the extinguishing of suffering and grief, for walking on the path of truth, for the realization of nibbāna” (nirvana). This is the course I’ll be doing for the next week.

Purists might object to my mixing Vipassana theory with Tibetan Buddhism and advaida-vedanta (non-duality) teachings, but so be it. To quote Ramana again, “As you are, so is the world. Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world? First, find out the truth behind yourself; then you will be in a better position to understand the truth behind the world…The state we call realization is simply being oneself, not knowing anything or becoming anything. If one has realized, he is that which alone is and which alone has always been. He cannot describe that state. He can only be that.”

Dedicated persistence in the face of adversity is a must! I would expect that for most, if not all, people who begin formal meditation, when first attempting to focus only on the rising and falling of the breath, the mind is found to be a raging torrent of sensations, thoughts & emotions. In that condition, quieting the mind for more than a second or two is impossible, and the idea of sitting for many hours a day seems absurd. With practice, however, the raging torrent is slowly transformed into a rolling river and, finally, a placid lake whose surface perfectly mirrors the moon.

During this transformation, one learns to dissociate from one’s thoughts and remain grounded in a blissful state of no-thought, realizing one of the most concise teachings ever, Sat-Chit-Ananda (existence-consciousness-bliss, uninterrupted by thought), an epithet and description for the subjective experience of the ultimate unchanging reality, a realization of the unity & wholeness of all existence. It can be considered a triple consciousness where all three elements can be taken separately, or considered as one because, in reality, each element is found in everything.

The material world is constantly changing, bodies constantly being born and dying; thoughts constantly being born and dying, in a seemingly endless chain. Underlying it all, however, is an unchanging, primordial consciousness, from which the whole universe—yea, the very spacetime continuum—emerges and returns. The concept of Śūnyatā (Emptiness) refers to the tenet that "all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature, and also refers to the Buddha-nature teachings and primordial or empty awareness, as in Dzogchen and Zen.

Many practitioners have attained this unborn, undying realization, and meditation is not necessarily required, although I seem to need it. The various yogic paths, of bhakti (devotion), jñāna (knowledge), karma (action, e.g. feeding the poor, nursing the sick, comforting the dying), and et cetera all meet at the top of the mountain, so pick what is the obvious choice for you, and get with it because, in the body you currently are, you don’t have forever.