Vipassana: Part Two

So I think I covered quite thoroughly the basics of a Vipassana retreat in my July post - the code of conduct and the reason for Noble Silence. But as I also mentioned, these are not really the most important parts of the course - they are just practices which help one to develop the Vipassana meditation technique. By now you're probably wondering 'what exactly is Vipassana?'. Apparently, it was the type of meditation that the Buddha was practising when he reached enlightenment (I don't exactly have the space or time to tell the entire story of Buddha here, but if you aren't familiar with his life or teachings, I highly recommend doing some reading, even via online resources). Apparently, the Buddha went through all kinds of meditation techniques in India, in order to find one that would allow him to attain enlightenment. Finally, he sat under a Bodhi tree and vowed never to arise until he found the truth. Fourty-nine days later, at the age of 35, it was said that he became awakened to the truth (known in Buddhism as The Four Noble Truths) and was from that point onwards known as Buddha, which roughly translates to 'the enlightened one'.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), the Vipassana retreat doesn't supply Bodhi trees for each student to sit under for 49 days until we too become like Buddha. What we do learn however, is to simply observe our selves and our surroundings with equanimity. Having an equanimous mind means that you lack craving and aversion. Why is it important to be equanimous? To answer that I probably need to explain what the Four Noble Truths are:

1) suffering is an engrained part of existence

2) the origin of suffering is craving for sensuality, acquisition of identity and annihilation

3) suffering can be ended

4) following the Noble eightfold path is the means to accomplish this

I really don't want to also explain what the Noble eightfold path is (because they are quite basic teachings that stem from all religions, and also because this post isn't meant to be a lesson on Buddhism). My point is though, that if all suffering comes from craving (or being averse) to various experiences, then logically, it would make sense that by eliminating those cravings and aversions, you eliminate your suffering. Make sense so far?

So here's how you put it in to practise. All over the surface of the skin there are constant little bio-chemical reactions taking place. We sometimes feel these as itches or tingling sensations, muscular twitches, or sometimes it feels like maybe an insect is on us but when we look there's nothing. In Vipassana, they refer to these sensations as 'sankhaaras'. Throughout your life (and if you believe in reincarnation then you can add your past lives as well), we have moments where we react to things either positively or negatively. Vipassana meditators believe that all these reactions get stored in your mind as sankhaaras. Some of your reactions are very superficial, and they come and go quite quickly, think of ripples on water. But there are other moments in our lives where we carry these cravings or aversions with us for very long times, and we hold on to them forever (some people even believe that at the time of death, these very 'heavy' sankhaaras get taken with you to your next life and continue to cause misery and suffering). These type of sankhaaras are described as being like a deep line etched into a stone. When you sit quietly, and still both your mind and your body, sankhaaras slowly start to bubble up to the surface of the skin and manifest themselves in the form of sensations. Some of them (the 'lighter' sankhaaras) are subtle sensations while others can be quite gross, intense sensations (such as pins and needles). The idea is that when you feel these sensations arise, the reactive part of your mind will always want to pay attention to them, it will want you to either develop a craving for them or an aversion.

This is where equanimity comes into play. You have to teach your mind how to observe these sensations without reacting to them. If you feel an itch on the tip of your nose, don't scratch it, don't react to it. Just sit and observe it. If you feel a pain in your leg and you want to change your position, don't. Just sit and observe it. You have to remind yourself of the law of impermanence. Nothing in life is forever, nothing stays the same. Everything changes, or as they say in Paali: Anitchya. When you realise that whatever sensations you feel are bound to dissipate eventually, you can learn to accept them, and observe them, without reaction. This is how you get rid of your 'old stock' of sankhaaras. But again, you have to be careful that even this doesn't become a craving. It's very easy to sit for meditation and crave freedom from your sankhaaras. That's not the point though. The point is to become equanimous, so that you desire nothing, and you are averse to nothing.

Perhaps I sound like a crazy person. Even if you don't believe that your cravings and aversions are stored in your mind and bubble to the surface in the form of tingles and itches (and I don't blame you if you think this sounds like utter 'bull'), anyone who sits in one position for long enough, in silence and stillness, will eventually feel the kind of sensations I am talking about, and will desperately want to react to them. There were days towards the end of the retreat where I could feel subtle sensations throughout my entire body (and apparently these sensations are constantly there but our mind is too cluttered to even notice them). There were also days where I had such a severe pain through one of my legs that I thought would never go away, and it didn't. But I experienced some moments where even though I had the pain, my mind had become so equanimous that I knew the pain existed, and I could feel it, but it didn't matter to me, because I knew eventually it would pass. Anitchya.

I can feel the scepticism already and I haven't even posted this! Is all that I learned from these 10 days, and 100 hours of meditation, how to sit and detach from pain? Not at all. Because when you realise that physical suffering is impermanent, you begin to apply your equanimity to other non-physical situations in the 'real world'. It is so much easier to learn this lesson by feeling it physically, before you can learn to apply it to more abstract experiences and reactions. And I'm not in any way completely equanimous in every situation. I still find things upset me or hurt me - but the reaction is nowhere near what it used to be. I'll give you an example. About six weeks after the retreat, I went to Vancouver for my friend's wedding. The flight there was extremely turbulent (and it was quite late at night so the sky was pitch black). I am not a very confident flyer, and a flight that turbulent would normally have been grounds for some serious freaking out. But instead, I sat quietly in my seat, and I thought about my life, and I asked myself:

"Divya, in the unlikely event that this plane doesn't make it, would you be all right with your life ending now?"

And normally I would have expected a response like this:

"Of course not! There's so much more I want to do. I still need to finish my PhD, and I need to find a job, and I need to meet a nice person and get married, and I need to become enlightened" and so on and so on.

But instead, I felt so...so strangely fine with everything. And maybe I knew that the idea of a domestic, 5 hour flight crashing and killing everyone on board was so impossible that I made peace with a rare outcome, but the even stranger thing was that during all the turbulence, I actually fell asleep for the rest of the flight (and slept quite well oddly enough). Have I overcome my fear of flying because of Vipassana? Of course not. Turbulence is scary, and the idea of falling thousands of feet to your death or exploding in an airplane is something that nobody wants to happen to them. But I think the little pocket of peace I managed to find was more about accepting that life doesn't last forever, and that death isn't a demotion, it's a promotion - so why fear it? Yes there is grief, yes there are tears in those sad moments, but why do we develop aversions to them? If you're grieving, just observe your grief, don't react to it, don't try to fight it, just accept its impermanence. Anitchya.