The on-line version of the New York Times has been running an occasional blog called Happy Days about the search for financial, emotional, physical, and spiritual contentment in these difficult economic times. On August 19, the author Robert Wright (The Evolution of God) wrote a nice piece about his experience with Vipassana meditation.
Vipassana, or insight meditation, is one of the oldest techniques of meditation, attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha himself. It is a way of transformation through self-observation and introspection. Vipassana emphasizes gaining insight into the way your mind works and has a reputation for being one of the more intellectual Buddhist traditions, but the insight that is gained is attained in a way that is not entirely intellectual.
Wright describes how his first meditation retreat about six years ago was one of the most amazing experiences of his life. "I came away from that week feeling I had found a new kind of happiness, deeper than the kind I’d always pursued." Yet, as he anticipated an upcoming retreat, he was feeling apprehension as much as elation. "Meditation retreats," he writes, "at this place, at least, are no picnic. You don’t follow your bliss. You learn not to follow your bliss, to let your bliss follow you. And you learn this arduously. If at the end you feel like you’re leaving Shangri-La, that’s because the beginning felt like Guantanamo."
Vipassana is not unlike Zen - Wright reports 5.5 hours per day spent in sitting meditation, 5.5 hours in walking meditation. At a typical Zen retreat, at least at our Center, we spend about 8 hours a day in sitting mediation, and only about 5 minutes of walking mediation for every 25 minutes of sitting.
By day three of his last retreat, Wright was "feeling achy, far from nirvana and really, really sick of the place." But what he hated above all was that he wasn’t succeeding as a meditator. The leaders of the retreat pointed out that one is not supposed to think of “succeeding” at meditating or blame oneself for failing. As Wright learned, to “succeed” he had to quit pursuing success and quit blaming himself for failing.
On Thursday night, the fifth night of the retreat, about 30 minutes into a meditation session, he had a profound sensation of seeing the structure of his mind, directly experiencing the structure of his mind in a new way that had great meaning for him. "All told," he writes, "I don’t think I’ve ever had a more dramatic moment."
I can relate to Wright's mixture of fondness and trepidation as a retreat approaches. There are two weekend retreats, zazenkais, coming up at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center with two guest teachers. This coming weekend (August 28-30), we will be graced with the presence of Dae Gak, a disciple of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn who received Dharma transmission as a Zen Master himself in 1994. And the following weekend (September 3-6), we will have a long weekend retreat (as opposed to a weekend-long retreat) with Seirin Barbara Kohn Sensei, former head priest of the Austin Zen Center who spent 15 years at the San Francisco Zen Center where she received Dharma transmission from Zenkei Blanche Hartman Roshi.
While I'm excited about the opportunity to practice with these two esteemed teachers, I also know that after all these years, I will still experience the aches and pains of long hours of sitting, my monkey mind will still rebel against the idea of "just sitting" (shikantaza) for hours on end, not to mention all the stresses and tensions that inevitably arise from devoting large portions of my time away from my many secular activities (oh, the self-perpetuating torments of a lay practitioner).
At the end of his retreat, still reeling from the Thursday-night experience, Wright told one of the meditation teachers about his insight. The teacher nodded casually, as if it was one of the standard stops on the path to enlightenment, but still very far from the end of the path. Through truly intensive meditation, he was told, the transformation of your view of your mind, your view of your mind’s relationship to reality, and your view of reality itself, can go much deeper.
Yes, but as Morpheus famously asked, "How far down the rabbit's hole are you willing to go?"
1 comment:
But what you make of all the other hours of your life that you do not spend sitting...some of which you share here...would seem to pay back the hours invested, no?
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