Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation

7/28/2019 Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation

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Shinzen Young

The reluctant monk

BY RAVI DYKEMA

"As long as you are focused, you are perfectly happy . It's when you get scattered thatyour life becomes unhappy. I came to realize that life is actually a giant biofeedback device."


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How does a Jewish man born into a normal, middle-class American familyend up a Japanese monk and scholar who hobnobs with neuroscientists? For Shinzen Young, it all started with a Friday-night double-feature at a tiny Japanesetheater in downtown Los Angeles. That childhood exposure to Japanese culturefueled a lifelong passion and quest that lead Young to master several Asianlanguages, undergo rigorous training in each of the three major Buddhistmeditative traditions, and become both a monk and a respected academician.

After many years in Japan, Young returned to the United States and set his sites onthe growing dialogue between the meditative practices of the East and thetechnological science of the West. His studies in that field have led him to develop,among other programs, innovative pain-management techniques and a phone-basedhome practice. Here, Young talks to Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about life inJapan, the rigors of meditation training, and the technological future of mindfulness

practice.

Were your parents involved in Buddhism or meditation?

SY : No, my parents are Jewish, and I was born into a normal, middle-classsituation in Los Angeles. When I was 14, my best friend was a third-generationJapanese-American. This was decades before Sushi became cool or people wereinterested in Asian martial arts; in fact, this was in the mid-50s, not that long after WWII, so Japan wasn t really looked upon very favorably.

But my best friend and his family used to go to Japanese movies at this tiny littletheater in downtown L.A., and they invited me one Friday to go with them. I hadno interest, but I didn t want to be rude, so I went.

It was a double feature. The first movie was a love story set in modern Japan, and itwas completely boring. But the second one was a Samurai movie set in 17thcentury Japan, and I was mesmerized. The people in the movie were obviouslyhuman, but they might as well have been from another planet. Their culture wascompletely different from anything I had ever encountered: the way the dressed,the way they talked, their values, the way they fought.After the movie was over, I started to interrogate my friend s parents Why didthey do this? and What did that mean? and they fed me snippets of Japaneseculture and language. I started going with them every Friday to see these Japanesemovies; afterwards, we d go to Little Tokyo, which is the Japanese section of L.A.,for Japanese food.

It was a foreign world to me, and a huge adventure. At the age of 14, I was learninga little bit of a foreign language, how to order in a Japanese restaurant, how to eatwith chopsticks, in an environment where I was the only non-Asian. I had a major epiphany at the age of 14, that if I really wanted to understand this culture,mastering the language was the key.


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RD: Did you start studying it then?

SY: No, I started by learning and hearing snippets of the language.

RD: You must have realized how hard it was.

SY: Eventually I did. It certainly wasn t like trying to learn Spanish, or even Latin.It s a language structured in a way that s fundamentally different from a standardEuropean language. I found out there was an alternative school system for Japanese-American kids that met in the afternoons and on Saturdays. TheJapanese-American kids had to go to it, just like Jewish kids like me had to go toHebrew school. But when I found out about Japanese school, I enrolled.

My parents thought it was terrific that I had such an esoteric intellectual interest atsuch an early age. So I graduated from Venice High School, and in the same week,I graduated from Sawtelle Japanese languages school, as the only non-Japanese-American kid. Then I went into UCLA as an Asian language major, and I did mysenior year in Japan as an exchange student.

RD: What did it feel like to be in the country that you had been so enchantedwith for so long?

SY: It was like a dream come true. It was the best year of my life up to that point. Iwas living my dream. I was fluent in Japanese, at a time when it was fairly rare for a foreigner to know the language. When I hit Japanese soil, I was like some rare

bird, a foreigner with whom any Japanese person could converse.

I was supposed to go to school, but I ditched it, like every Japanese college studentditched school; you get a college education in high school in Japan, so once you hitcollege, you just goof off.

RD: Really? Like an extended senior year of high school?

SY: Yes, or at least that s how it was in the 60s. So, like most Japanese collegestudents, I goofed off. Instead of going to classes, I would wander around in thestreets and if something caught my interest, I d start to talk to somebody. They dlook at me, they d look at my face, and then I d start speaking this very polite,eloquent and educated Japanese. The response I got was usually something likeYes, please come in. Oh, you like that 300 -year-old painting? Please take it back to America! Every door opened to me, from the Imperial Palace to the slumswhere the Yakuza, which was sort of the Japanese mafia, hung out. I could goanywhere I wanted, and I did. It was a huge adventure and learning experience.

RD: Did you have an intention of using that information later?


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SY: At that time, I more or less wanted to become Japanese. I figured I d probablygo into something related to Asia in graduate school, to be an academician in theAsian fields. But one of the experiences I had that year in Japan was staying brieflyat a Zen Buddhist temple. I watched them meditate, but I couldn t see myself doingit. I was physically wimpy and very agitated; I had little ability to deal with

physical or emotional stresses. But as I began talking to these monks, I got thisvibe that they knew a secret, sort of the secret to unconditional happiness.

RD: What made you think that?

SY: They had a sense of a subtle, underlying happiness and absolute wellbeing, nomatter what. I just got a vibe. It was like they knew a secret and they would shareit, but they wouldn t force it on you.

When I returned to the United States after my senior year in college, I learned of aBuddhist studies program at the University of Wisconsin, where I could get a Ph.D.specializing in Buddhism. They were giving defense scholarships because we wereat war in Viet Nam, and they wanted people to understand Buddhism. I got a three-year defense grant to go.

RD: Why did the government want Americans to understand Buddhism?

SY: The assumption was that we needed people who understood Buddhism because it was a political force. They should have been funding Islamic studies;they were behind the eight ball on that. So I went to the University of Wisconsin,completed all my course work very quickly, and then went back to Japan toresearch my Ph.D. thesis.

RD: Were you studying a particular version of Buddhism in Wisconsin?

SY: Yes; East Asian Buddhism was my specialty, East Asia being China, Japan,Korea and Viet Nam. But they required that you have a strong background in IndicBuddhism as well, so I had to learn Sanskrit and Pali, and I also studied Tibetan.So I went back to Japan, and I was to do research on my Ph.D. thesis, which was to

be Singon Buddhism. Singon Buddhism is Vajrayana. It s related to the Tibetan practice, not in that it comes from Tibet but in that both Tibetan Vajrayana andJapanese Vajrayana go back to the same late Indic sources.

RD: So your area of study at UW was one of the two versions of the JapaneseVajrayana?

SY: That s correct; essentially no Westerner had ever specialized in JapaneseVajrayana. By that time, many were specializing in the Tibetan Vajrayana, but veryfew were interested in the Japanese form.


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You needed a very special language skill set to study this, which I had. I went totheir main training place, Mount Koya, Japan, with a letter of introduction from theKoyasan branch center in L.A., and with my impeccably impressive language skillsand a battery of other skills that had always opened every door for me in Japan. Butwhen I showed up, they more or less said, Get out of here, kid. We don t want tohave anything to do with you. This is not for you to adorn your academic ego with.This is a practice that we do to go beyond the small self and become liberated. If you want to do it from that

perspective, fine. But otherwise,here s the door.

RD: And your idea was to doresearch there?

SY: My idea was to spend a year researching Shingonacademically, come back, write aPh.D. thesis based on Shingonthat would become the basis of a

book, and become the man for Japanese Vajrayana in theWestern world. I was going tocarve out my own little academickingdom. But I guessed theysniffed that out, and their positionwas, If you want to study thisstuff, you have to become amonk, and you have to practiceit.

RD: So theres that meditationcushion staring at you again.

SY: Yes, and I was still saying No way. I was pretty pissed off, because I dnever had the door slammed in my face.

Then something happened that really twisted me around emotionally. When I wasat the University of Wisconsin, my major professor and my idol was a man namedRichard Robinson, who had the most impressive intellect of any human I have ever met. His specialty was Buddhist logic, a study that s used to show contradictionsand paradoxes rather similar to what happened in ancient Greece with the Schoolof Parmenides and therefore bring people to an understanding of what inBuddhism is called emptiness. He was my ideal of what I wanted to become.

While I was in Japan, I got a letter that informed me that he had had a horrific


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accident in his house. A fuse blew out, and he went down to the basement tochange it. There was no source of light, so he struck a match; he didn t know thatthere was a gas leak, and he basically became a human torch. He was completelymaimed; he lived for just a month.The first noble truth of Buddhism, the truth of the suffering nature of existence, hithome at an emotional level. I thought to myself, my God, this is the smartest man Iknow, and what good is that going to do, if you just writhe in agony, and you can tuse yo ur brain, you can t think?There s no way out of that, other than what the Buddhists promise, which isliberation from the mind and the body, happiness independent of conditions.Writhing in agony is just a condition. If the happiness is true, it truly is independentof any and all conditions. Buddhism actually makes that claim.

After hearing of Richard s accident, I was ready to take them up on it, to do it their way. I said, Okay, I ll do it. I ll become a monk. You tell me what to do, and I lldo it.

RD: So the year you planned to use doing research, you ended up learninghow to be a monk?

SY: Yes, but it took a year just to learn how to get around in the temple. Then,after about a year, when it was coming up to winter, and the weather was gettingcolder, the Abbott of the temple said, If you want to do this, you re going to haveto do it the old- fashioned way, in winter. You ll do 100 days in isolation. Youwon t be talking to anybody but me, and you ll only talk to me for a few minutesevery few d ays. You can t have any food after noon. You ll be spending the bulk of your time in the main hall doing the Vajrayana rituals, and there is no source of heat, just a thin wall between you and the blizzard outside. And there are certainother esthetical pr actices around cold that you will be required to do. I said okay of course, with enormous trepidation, because this was the last thing in the worldthat I would ever think of exposing myself to.

RD: You dont look like the kind of guy who likes to be co ld.

SY: I don t. But I thought about Robinson, and what can happen to a human being,and I didn t want to have my happiness dependent on conditions. I didn t want tolive under that sword of Damocles, that hell is just a telephone call away. So I hadsome motivation, to do something that was completely against my physical andmental nature.

In the Vajrayana practice, there are many complex ceremonies that involvedevoking and venerating deities. But at the depths, it s a meditation practice. I had todo three of these ceremonies, called sadhanas, every day. Before I began, I had togo to this frozen cistern outside, break the ice on it, fill a huge wooden bucket, takeoff all my clothes, and pour this ice water over myself. That s called mizugori in


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Ja panese, which means cold water purification. The water would actually freezeas it hit the ground, so I was slipping around barefoot on ice.

On the third day, I had an epiphany: Okay, I thought. I have to do this threetimes every day for 100 days. I m on day three, so I have 97 more days of this. Ihave three choices here. I will either give up, because I just can t take it. Or I amgoing to suffer egregiously for 97 days. Or I am going to stay in a concentratedstate all my waking hours for the nex t 97 days.

When I was doing this cold-water purification, I noticed that if I stayed focused, itdidn t bother me as much. But if my consciousness was scattered, I was insuffering city; I was just freaking out, and completely overwhelmed. So I said,Okay. I m going to just do my damndest to keep in a focused state all my wakinghours as I go through this thing. It was like a feedback mechanism: if I wassuffering, it meant I had lost my concentration and focus.

I went into the practice one person; 100 days later, I came out, and I wasfundamentally re-engineered. I was just not the same person. I had very differentvalues. I was no longer strongly interested in the academic study of Buddhism. Iwas more interested in the experience of Buddhism, so I stayed on.

RD: Did the austerity comprising that 100 days continue in your monk life?

SY: There were varying cycles or periods of more intensity and less intensity, but Ialways had this feedback device. So as long as you stay focused, you re perfectlyhapp y, but it s when you get scattered that your life becomes unhappy. I came torealize that life is actually a giant biofeedback device. The reason you go to themonastery is so you eventually come to the place where you can see ordinary dailylife as a monastery; it just took a special situation in order to develop thatsensitivity.

In any event, I stayed on, and I continued to do practice. I didn t just do Vajrayana;I also did Zen while I was in Japan. At a Zen retreat, I had a pivotal event. As theretreatants were coming in at the beginning of the retreat, I noticed there wasanother Westerner not just any old Westerner, but a Roman Catholic priest. Hehad a Roman collar, a reddish complexion, and he really stood out as a foreigner. Ithought, Wow. A Catholic priest at a Zen retreat. What s that about?

At a break period, I struck up a conversation. The priest s name was Father William Johnston. He s written many books, but at that time, he d only writtenone, called Christian Zen, which was about the dialogue between Catholicism andZen. More broadly, that s part of a dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity,and he was a major player in that dialogue.I didn t even know such a dialogue existed. I would have never thought there waseven a basis for a dialogue. Catholicism and Buddhism? What do they have in


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common? As it turns out, they have a mystical core in common. The kinds of experiences that occur to people when they do Buddhist training and the kinds of experiences that constitute traditional Catholic contemplative practice are the samekinds of experiences.

Suddenly I realized, oh my God. What I m learning in Buddhist practice is notlimited to Buddhism. It s a universal that s found all over the world. I came todiscover that there was a Jewish meditative tradition and an Islamic meditativetradition. Although the cultures and theologies and practices of these religions varyenormously, and seem to be at odds with each other, the core experiences of themeditators overlap. This absolutely blew my mind.In her book The Interior Castle, when Saint Theresa describes her journey throughlife, it fits perfectly with Buddhism. The theology is completely different; there sno mention of God in Buddhism. But if you look below the surface, and see wh at sactually going on, you see that it s the same kinds of experiences. You can see it inRumi, who is Muslim. You can see it in Isaac Luria, who is a Jewish Kabbalist.This is a universal, human phenomenon, that doesn t even have an accepted word.

I came to see what I was doing in Buddhist practice as part of a much bigger picture. Suddenly, everything fell into place, and I could see there was a core set of experiences that were universal to all forms of spirituality.

I have to thank Father Johnston for that, and for something else. Just before I leftJapan, he gave me an article talking about scientific studies on the brainwaves of meditators. He was excited about this, because it would seem to lead to the possibleintegration of science and spirituality.

I had no science background, and had always considered myself very poor in thescience fields. I felt like I d never understand the sciences. But now I had a reasonto be interested, now that science was related to meditation. So I had another epiphany: if we think of Asian culture as a mountain, what is at its peak? What hasAsia done better than any other culture? It created the technology of meditation.

The Buddhist and Hindu approach, as exemplified through Yoga and Buddhist practices, were incomparably more systematic and clearer and better organized andmore efficient than the approaches of other cultures. It s pretty hit -and-miss withthe Christian contemplatives; it s amazing that they were able to do as well as theydid, given the lack of a system in their studies and practices. In Buddhism, I saw ascience and technology of internal transformation that was superior to anythingelse the world had come up with.

At that point, I felt I had gone as far as you can go with Asia; I was on the peak of this mountain, and I m looking out. Is there another comparable peak somewherein the world that s as impressive? And it occurred to me that Western science andWestern technology represented a different peak, one that was superior to anything


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As I was teaching, I realized that in order to effectively teach this stuff in the West,I would have to radically reevaluate the entire Buddhist tradition, take it apart and

put it back together, informed by the spirit of science. I wanted to create somethingthat worked naturally for this culture. Because I had an academic background inBuddhism, and because I had a pretty solid self-taught background in science, and

because I meditated for year after year, decade after decade, I started to have someconfidence in creating a contemporary approach to classical enlightenment. Iwould never claim that it was a better approach; it was just a different approach,one that had certain criteria.

RD: What were those criteria?

SY: I wanted it to be, in a sense, secular, not formulated in the language of religion. But I also wanted it to lead to the classical results: insight intoimpermanence, no self, freedom from ego. I wanted this approach to capitalize onall the major innovations in the history of world mysticism, because differentthings work better for different people. I also wanted to create a system that would

be easy for scientists to study.

I also wanted to create a system that could be supported interactively. The standardway of teaching meditation is Here s the cushion, here s the technique, now go toit, get back to me in a few days and we ll talk about what s going on. A more efficient way is to give people interactive, personal coaching sessions, analogous tohaving a private trainer.

I discovered that if I sat down with a person and gave them a meditation technique,and then a few minutes later asked them what was happening, and gave them somefeedback, and then asked again, and gave feedback again, even a rank beginner could typically meditate for 90 minutes, and have a quality experience.

I found that for teaching people initially and for supporting them when they re passing through challenges, this interactive approach works really well. I wanted tocreate a system in which coaching would be done by people, but could also be

partially automated and implemented by an artificial intelligence program that talksto you and listens to you not a text-based program, an advanced artificialintelligence program that has voice recognition, that would be completelyindistinguishable from a session with a live coach.

Instead of thinking of that program as a lesser version of a teacher, I tell people tothink of it as a vastly improved version of a book or a guided CD. It interacts withyou and responds to exactly what you are experiencing now, but it saves in itsdatabase all your previous experiences, and it has a file on your strengths andweaknesses, so it optimizes the guidance moment by moment.


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This system would work especially well for times when the shit hits the fan in your life, for times where you would grow immensely if you could meditate but youcan t meditate because it s too overwhelming. Remember what happened to myidol and mentor? He was in a situation where he would have to either suffer or transcend. Although you might not die horrifically the way he did, something sgoing to happen. Either you ll be injured, you re going to get sick, you re going todiscover a behavioral issue, you re hooked on a substance. You re going to be

betrayed by a friend. You re going to betray a friend. A parent will die.Something is going to happen in every person s life that s goin g to put them into

physical, mental and emotional intensities comparable to what people go through intraditional training. Even if you have a background in meditation, if thecircumstances are severe enough, you might find that you can t remember how to

practice. But if somebody interactively sits down with you and takes you throughit, you can get right back on track. You ll get what I call MMM maximummeditation mileage out of what otherwise would be the worst experience of your life.

How many people can I possibly do that with? How many people can I train to dothat? It s very labor intensive. But what would happen if I created a meditationsystem that capitalizes on all the innovations in meditation, is fully secular and isculturally universal. Instead of appointing a successor like traditional teachers do,I ll build my successor, an interactive version. It s even better than me, because Iwon t put any of my ego into it. Although it can maybe only do 60 or 70 percent of what I would do, it can do that for 10,000 people simultaneously around the worldat pennies on the hour, so that anyone can have a senior personal meditation coach.

In addition to that, I wanted to run traditional retreats where people come for a dayor a week. But most people don t have the time, they can t afford it, they don t livearound a retreat center. What if we ran another kind of retreat, based on telephonesand conference calls as the delivery system? In addition to traditional on-siteretreats, I would also give conference-call retreats, short only about four hourslong but very intense. In other words, it would be a fully modern path that wasconvenient for scientists to study and would bring about the traditional results of liberation from body and mind.

RD: How can our readers learn more about that program?

SY: Just go to my main website, basicmindfulness.org . I have a practice programset up in such a way that it requires no previous experience in any form of practice.The second weekend of every month, I do a Friday, Saturday and Sunday programmade up of many rituals, from two to four hours long. They re all independentfrom each other, and there s always one intro program.

RD: I assume that part of all this practice is to achieve some kind of enlightenment. Are there different stages or degrees of enlightenment? Or are
http://www.basicmindfulness.org/http://www.basicmindfulness.org/http://www.basicmindfulness.org/http://www.basicmindfulness.org/


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you either enlightened or not enlightened?

SY: In traditional Buddhism, there are four levels of enlightenment. The first levelis relatively common, the highest level, relatively rare. The stretch between the firstenlightenment and complete enlightenment is bigger than the stretch between non-enlightened and first enlightened. People who have had the initial experience of what we call no self, where they have actually seen that there is no thing insidethem called a self, which also could be called the experience of oneness, are notthat uncommon. As for people who are fully enlightened, I ve only met a few.

RD: Would you say you are enlightened, that you have achieved the goal of mystical practice?

SY: That s an interesting question. When asked pointedly, Are you enlightened or not? people who are enlightened have a whole bunch of ways of dealing with it.Most people will not say yes. You don t have to be a rocket scientist to figure outwhy. On the other hand, to be coy is also the wrong answer. If you re coy aboutyour own personal experiences, if you re not willing to put them into words insome sort of public venue, people w on t know it s possible, and there will never bea unified science of mysticism.

In some ways, scientists have less ego than enlightened teachers. They have to puttheir results out into the public for public scrutiny and public investigation. One of the things that held science back in the Middle Ages was that it was a privateendeavor; science was a secret, and it wasn t subject to peer review or publicanalysis.

I decided to take an extreme position. My extreme position would be I would bewilling to talk with anybody about anything I have ever experienced, veryexplicitly, and very openly.So in answer to your initial question, Am I enlightened? I would say this: I don ttalk to people about anything that I haven t personally experienced. I don t teach

people things that are outside of my personal experience.

RD: Well, is your reputation trashed? Thats one of the things spiritualteachers worry about.

SY: Yeah, well, as the Tao Te Ching says, Those who know do not speak. Thosewho speak do not know. But actually that is profoundly untrue. There arenumerous teachers who claimed to be enlightened, and use the E word in public,and say, Yes, I am enlightened.

RD: Or they just empower their followers to say the same thing, My teacheris enlightened.


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SY: Yes, that s a third - party sell. People will tell me, Hey, check out this website.There s this kid out in rural Vermont who claims to have enlightenment, or whatever. The very first thing that goes through my mind is They probably are.But you can t know for sure. I m inclined to believe it, because enlightenment isnatural for everyone; it s just waiting to happen.

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Essential reading on what causes tumor/polyp/cyst/fibroid formations, the dangers

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Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation

by Shinzen Young

Vipassana is a word in the Pali language, one of the ancient languages of India alongwith Sanskrit. Sometimes Vipassana is translated as 'insight meditation' because one of the main effects of the practice is that you get deep understandings about deepuniversal issues such as how it is that pain turns into suffering, how it is that pleasureeither becomes satisfaction or becomes neediness, and how it is that the sense of self arises.

Vipassana meditation is also called 'mindfulness meditation' because we are veryattentive. The main technique is to become extraordinarily attentive to ordinaryexperience. Unfortunately the word mindfulness can be a bit misleading if you interpret

mindfulness to mean that you are constantly thinking about what you're doing. Mindful inthe proper sense of the word simply means to be attentive and conscious about what'shappening.

The word 'insight' can be a little misleading too because it's not only a word fromBuddhism, but also is a word used in psychotherapy. When you do psychotherapy youget insights. Of course those insights are very important, but they are typically insightsinto your own personality, and the specific issues of your life. The insights that come asa result of Vipassana are deeper and more general than those that are ordinarilyencountered in psychotherapy. They deal with very broad issues that are multiply rather than singularly applicable. In science, a deep theory augers many specific applications.

Out of a single fundamental breakthrough in science you may have dozens

or eventhousands of specific applications. So in the same way, the insights that come fromVipassana practice let us understand the very nature of personality itself, not just thingsabout our own personality. So Vipassana is "insight" in the sense of deep insight and itis "mindfulness" in the sense of extraordinary attentiveness.

The basic premise of this practice can be stated rather simply. Whenever one brings anextraordinary degree of mindfulness and equanimity to ordinary experience thisproduces insight. And it also produces something called purification. Now, every word I

just used is a technical term in Buddhism. Buddhism is a kind of inner science. TheWest developed an outer science with a technical vocabulary to describe, in a way thatno other culture did, the external physical reality. In the East they have an analogouslyprecise and technical vocabulary, but it is applied to the inner world. That is to say, theworld of subjective experience: hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the feeling body andthe thinking mind. They developed a science of these six senses and it's calledVipassana.

I find in science a very appropriate metaphor for this particular kind of meditation. Whenyou study science you know that you are going to encounter technical terms. When you


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encounter a technical term you should not project your own meanings onto it. You haveto listen very carefully to the exact words that the teacher uses in defining that term. For example, in ordinary colloquial English, force, power, and energy are often used assynonyms, but for a physicist they are defined in specific and very different ways.(Force is proportional to acceleration and mass; energy is force applied over a distance;

and power is the rate of which energy is being generated or consumed.) In a similar way, I'm going to give you some technical vocabulary from the Vipassana tradition.

One such term is 'equanimity.' It does not mean a cooled out, passive or indifferentattitude. Rather, it means an attitude of not interfering with the operation of the sixsenses. If you have a sensation in your knee and it's painful and it wants to spread, youlet it spread. Why? Because you discover that it is precisely the interference with thatsensation that causes suffering, not the sensation itself. Equanimity literally means"balance." It means not to push and pull the flow of the senses. It does not for a momentimply that one would fail to take action with respect to external circumstance, nor does itimply passivity, apathy or anything like that. Equanimity is radical permission to feel.

Equanimity is a dropping of internal friction with respect to the flow of these six senses:hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the feeling body and the thinking mind. As a state of radical openness, equanimity is equivalent to love.

Whenever one brings mindfulness and equanimity to ordinary experience, anevolutionary process takes place, consisting of two aspects. One aspect is insight andthe other is purification. Let's talk first about what we mean by purification. We all havewithin us sources of unhappiness. You notice that very quickly when you sit down tomeditate. You'll feel just fine and then there will be something that will make your worldless than perfect. You get sleepy, or your mind wanders, or this or that emotion comesup, negative tapes start to come up, traumatic memories appear, you feel angry, you

want to jump out of your skin, you're running all sorts of fantasies, doing things to divertyourself, you're aware of inner conflicts. We are chock full of sources of unhappinesswhich are completely foreign to our being. It is not in the nature of consciousness tosuffer. However, we have acquired certain limiting forces: cravings and aversions,painful memories, inappropriate yet habitual behavior patterns, and so forth.

When we sit down and do this practice that's all going to come up. So you don't alwaysfeel good while doing Vipassana meditation. In fact you might feel lousy. I know, havingheard that, some of you may want to leave right now. You say, "I thought meditation issupposed to make a person feel great." Yes, in the long run, but an important aspect of meditation is to sit down and start working through the sources of not feeling great,whatever they may be. You literally eat your way through them, one after another, after another, after another. How? By just being mindful and having equanimity, that's all.Whatever comes up, you'll observe it and you'll do nothing. You'll be very aware andthat's all.

Now that may seem trivial at best, stupid at worst. But it is actually quite powerful. Let'ssay that one of these blockages to happiness comes up as we meditate a negativetape, a craving, an aversion, an inner conflict, a congealing. If we reject it and say "I


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don't want you," we're pushing it away. But in order to reject it we have to "touch" it, bypushing on it. If on the other hand we identify with it, buy into it and let it pull us away,then again we've "touched" it. As soon as one touches it, one recharges the energysupply of that negativity. If you try to push it away or you let it pull you, you areidentifying with it, touching it. Any touch whatsoever means that this particular negativity

is able to 'recharge its individual battery' as it were, from your general pool of your energy. But if we don't touch it then it has to play itself out on its own power sourcewhich is quite finite and if we continue to be alert and simply observe, eventually theintrinsic energy source of that negativity dissipates and it goes away forever. It getsworked through.

This process of "watching negativity to death" is called purification. As we work throughthe blockages to happiness, our intrinsic happiness the nature of our consciousnesswhich is effortless effulgent joy becomes evident. If the dirt is cleaned away from thewindow, the sun that was always there is able to shine through. The spiritual realitywhich is the nature of ordinary experience is able to shine forth.

Most people would affirm such a spiritual reality, but they don't directly experience it.They experience only their own projections, wishful thinking, or beliefs about it, withoutever being able to see it directly. Yet everyone has the ability to come into direct contactwith the Source. Through the continued practice of attention (mindfulness) andopenness (equanimity), one can work through what's in the way. It takes time, but thetime is going to pass anyway, so why not live it to the max?

So the essence of this practice can be stated as a simple formula: ordinary experienceplus mindfulness plus equanimity yields insight and purification. In this formula, eachterm is defined very precisely. Ordinary experience is defined as hearing, seeing,

smelling, tasting, the feeling body and the thinking mind. Mindfulness is defined asspecificity in awareness, clarity in awareness, continuity in awareness, richness inawareness, precision in awareness. Equanimity is defined as not interfering with theflow of the senses at any level, including the level of preconscious processing.

When sufficient mindfulness and equanimity are brought to bear on ordinaryexperience, we arrive at purification and insight. And, as a result of the purification andinsight, our intrinsic happiness, our true birthright and spiritual reality, gets uncoveredand we discover that what we thought was the world of phenomena the world of time,space, and matter turns out to really be a world of spiritual energy, and that we are indirect contact with it moment by moment. Because, when the senses become purified,when the inner conflicts at all levels have been broken up, the flow of these ordinarysenses turns into a prayer, a mantra, a sacred song, and we find that, just by living our life, we are in moment by moment contact with the Source. In the Christiancontemplative tradition this is called the "practice of the presence of God." In the Jewishmystical tradition it is called "briah yesh me ayn" the experience of things (yesh) beingcontinuously created (briah) from no-thing (ayn), that is, from God.


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For most people the senses are "opaque." Do you understand what I mean by the wordopaque? A window is opaque if it is covered by soot; light can't come through. The sootis craving, aversion, and ignorance. When that's cleared away, the ordinary sensesbecome literally transparent. It is very hard to describe what this is like. Hearing returnsto being part of the effortless flow of nature, seeing returns to being part of the effortless

flow of nature, and likewise with smelling, tasting, the body sensations whether they arepleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, they all go back to being part of "God's breath" so tospeak.

Even the thinking process returns to being part of this effortless flow. At the beginningstages of meditation one is very concerned with overcoming the wandering thoughts inorder to develop enough calm and concentration to be able to practice mindfulness. Butwhen you get further along in the process there will be no necessity whatsoever to havea still mind because the ordinary flow of thought will be experienced as not differentfrom the activity of the Source.

So to do Vipassana practice means simply to be very precise and accepting moment bymoment with regard to what is happening in your sense door. That may seem like atrivial practice. One might think, "What's the big deal. I'm sitting here, so now I'm clearlyaware of an itch in my tush, or now I know that the sound is calling my attention. Sowhat?" But when all the components of experience become distinct enough, whenthere's crystal clarity about exactly what's happening moment by moment, then thesenses become literally transparent, i.e., insubstantial. And a reality that is beyond timeand space can shine through. One is able to contact the Source as a pure "doing"continuously molding time, space, self and world moment by moment. Technically, thisis referred to as "insight into impermanence." Well, once you've reached that point you'llnever be bored again, I promise you.

Now let's talk a little more about this technical term: insight. In Vipassana you getinsights and understandings into the most fundamental aspects of our being. Here wehave another analogy from science.

When people observe under a microscope they start to discover things they could never see with the naked eye. There's no way to know that our bodies are made up of trillionsof little cells. No matter how hard you look at your body with the naked eye, you'll never see them. But if you look under a microscope you will, and you will understandsomething deep and fundamental about the nature of all organisms: it's called the celltheory of life. This is the basis of modern biology and modern medicine. A microscope isan awareness extending tool that allows us to see something that is always there butnot evident to the naked eye. The mindfulness practice is to the exploration of your internal world what the microscope is to the exploration of the external world. It allowsyou to see finer levels of structure that are absolutely invisible to people otherwise, butare very important.

For example, as you are observing, you'll be able to see that pain is one thing, andresistance to the pain is something else, and when the two come together you have an


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experience of suffering. You will get an insight into the nature of suffering (S = P x R),'suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance.' You'll be able to see that's true not onlyfor physical pain, but also for emotional pain and its true not only for little pains but alsofor big pains. It's true for every kind of pain no matter how big, how small, or whatcauses it. Whenever there is resistance there is suffering. As soon as you can see that,

you gain an understanding of what makes pain a problem, and as soon as you gain thatinsight, you'll begin to have some freedom. You come to realize that as long as we arealive we can't avoid pain. It's built into our nervous system. But we can certainly learn toexperience pain without it being a problem.

If you've never meditated you may be completely lost as to what I'm talking about. Youmay even think I'm talking gibberish. And there's a good reason for that. For mostpeople, by the time they are conscious of a physical or emotional pain they havealready turned it into suffering by resisting it. The resistance begins at the preconsciousprocessing level of each moment of experience. So the idea that you can experiencediscomfort without it being a problem doesn't make sense to most people because for

them every time there's discomfort there's suffering. The distinction between pain andsuffering and their relationship is invisible to the average person because you have tolook with a sort of 'microscope' an awareness extending tool to observe the painover and over again with high states of concentration until you can begin to see that thepain is one thing and the resistance is something else and when the two come together you suffer, but when there's just pain you don't suffer. Pain is just part of nature. It's justas effortless as ripples spreading on a pond, or as the wind blowing through the trees. Itis possible to actually 'go on vacation' inside your pain. You don't have to go to themountains or the seashore. Of course you can also go on vacation inside your pleasureor inside your neutral sensations. This is an example of insight. It's something that youcan not see with the naked eye. I can tell you about it and you'll either believe me or notbelieve me. On the other hand, if you observe long enough and hard enough, you'll seefor yourself that it is actually true. And will that be important? Just wait until the next timeyou suffer in some way and you'll know!

Spiritual insight is like a many-faceted jewel. One facet is called freedom from suffering.What are some other facets? Well, look at the other side of the picture, how aboutpleasure. Does pleasure bring lasting satisfaction for most people? Does eachexperience of pleasure transform most people? Does more pleasure also elevate your base-line of satisfaction in life? Usually not. In fact often the opposite. Often pleasureleads to drivenness, neediness, compulsion. Does that mean there's something wrongwith pleasure? Absolutely not. Just as there is grasping around pain ("resistance"),there is also grasping around pleasure ("craving"). Pleasure in and of itself is a verypurifying experience, but if pleasure arises and there's any grasping or holding, even theslightest congealing around the flow of that pleasure, then that pleasure does not givemuch satisfaction. On the other hand, when the grasping is dropped, the pleasure givesreally lasting satisfaction, something changes on the inside, and one's level of fulfillmentis raised permanently. So pure pain purifies, pure pleasure purifies. What do I mean bypure pain? Pain without resistance. What do I mean by pure pleasure? Pleasure withoutcraving.


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Another facet of insights is related to a person's sense of self. There are things that aretrue and useful to know about how one's sense of self arises moment by moment. Wethink there is a 'thing' inside us called a self, but upon closer investigation we discover that there is an activity called personality that rises and passes as part of the effortlessflow of nature. That activity called personality is made up of certain ideas and certain

body sensations that moment by moment give us the sense that "I am." When thoseideas and body sensations are greeted with complete awareness and zero interference,then we have a wonderful paradoxical experience. Obviously if you have completeawareness and zero interference with those ideas and body sensations that in thismoment give you the sense "I am," then we would have to say that you are allowingyour personality to completely express itself. On the other hand, whenever you haveany experience and maintain continuous awareness and zero interference, thatexperience becomes clear in the two senses of the English word as I described before.It becomes very distinct but it also becomes transparent. So the fully experiencedpersonality is a transparent wave rather than an opaque particle. The fully experiencedself is a 'doing' rather than a 'thing' and hence is sometimes called "no-self." Once you

realize that, your sense of self becomes elastic like rubber, and you can expand andcontract effortlessly with the flow of events. You can think of it as an elastic self whichcan get as big or as small as the circumstance requires, a bouncy and vibrant pure"doing" called personality. So you can learn how to complete your personality and inlearning that you also learn how to sometimes let go of your personality. An elastic self can get as big as the whole universe and therefore can encompass all things and it canget as small as zero and therefore know a state of true rest, real peace and security.

So, with this practice we bring mindfulness (specificity of awareness) and equanimity(non-interfering with awareness) to ordinary experience. As a result, we get purification,which is a release of the blockages to happiness, and we get insight which is a deep,many-faceted understanding into the nature of our experience. As a result of this whathappens? We become empowered, we become free. We have a sense of freedom thatis not dependent on circumstances, we have a sense of happiness that is notdependent on conditions.

This process of developing a sense of happiness independent of circumstances is quitechallenging but actually this is only half of the spiritual path. The other half of the pathinvolves what you 'put out' into the world. In addition to Vipassana mindfulness, onealso cultivates habitual states of Loving Kindness and Compassion, and translatesthese subjective states into objective actions that are of benefit to others.

One might say that through mindfulness meditation the old dirty paint is scraped off thewalls of the soul and through daily loving kindness meditation a new beautiful coat is puton one layer at a time.

There is much to be said about developing Loving Kindness and Compassion and theintimate link between Insight and Love on the spiritual path. Suffice it for now to say thatthrough mindfulness and equanimity the very substance of the feeling self becomesporous, transparent, elastic, and vibratory. Being porous it can soak up any flavor, being


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transparent it can take on any coloration, being elastic and vibratory it can resonate anytone. Through Loving Kindness and related meditations one intentionally imparts toone's feeling core a habitual coloration, flavor and tone of deep human warmth andbeneficence. This constantly flows out and subtly but significantly influences the peoplearound. At the level of action it translates into various expressions of effortless service

to others.

Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation

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