Vipassana Meditation: Lessons Learned
An essay about a recent 10-day meditation retreat I attended. Fun GIFs included.
Recently, I felt that my writing was a bit lifeless. I was researching stuff, forming an opinion, and communicating it to you. While fun, it lacks the touch of reality — I wasn’t living through what I was writing about. Well, this post is different. Hope you’ll like it.
TL;DR because this article needs it (over 7k words):
The good:
it’s easier to be reflective, driven by higher-order values instead of instinctual drives;
attentional capacity improves — gains in sustaining and switching attention;
better able to cope with emotions and sensations within the body (I discuss anger and pain);
improvements in follow-through — narrowing of intention-behavior gap;
compassion with and validation of others becomes easier, more automatic.
The bad:
scientific-like but still religious — the technique itself is secular, universal, and without any religious flavourings, but the doctrine that surrounds it isn’t.
moralistic — despite preaching that “everyone needs to find their own Truth”, both the teachers and experienced students have sometimes myopic views.
some concepts are too convenient — the issues I have with the notions of the Soul and the Afterlife.
I conclude that, by a wide margin, meditation is net-positive. If you watch out for some of the downsides, the technique itself is secular, universal, and confers nearly immediate benefits.
That’s basically the gist. For the details and the promised GIFs, read on.
There are many, many studies that find the link between meditation and/or mindfulness and some positive outcome. For instance:
Sumantry and Stewart (2021) find a generalized positive effect on attention (g = 0.158) and its facets.
Yakobi, O., Smilek, D. & Danckert (2021) find an overall effect (consisting of attention, executive control, and working memory) of mindfulness meditation of g = 0.2.
Sun, Lu-Na et al. (2021) find that mindfulness meditation alleviates military-related PTSD symptoms (standardized mean difference (SMD) = −0.33; 95% CI [−0.45, −0.21]; p < 0.0001).
I could list hundreds of other studies here. When you look at the literature, the onslaught of positive results leaves you with the impression that meditation can improve anything. Next to science, there’s also the experience of others: meditation has been around for thousands of years in various cultures and religions with the general consensus that it’s quite cool.
But since my sensibilities lie on the skeptical side, this all seems too good to be true1. So, I wasn't surprised that there are studies (and informal investigations) that question the divine powers of meditation.
If the science and thousands of years of accumulated experience testifying to the supremacy of meditation aren’t enough, what is? The answer, of course, is Shia LeBouf.
Which means: do things and test for yourself.
So, the rest of this article is me being a Shia LeBeouf of meditation. You see, I attended a 10-day Vipassana retreat that ended a week ago. My experiences are still fresh like the buttcheek imprint on the beach. It's time to see whether the overwhelmingly positive results science finds square with my own experience. Or whether there’s a kernel of truth in the critiques.
What’s to come, relevance & caveats
First, I'll describe the meditation technique we used. I then follow with the description of the course — the timetable and all — so that we establish some common ground. Lastly, I discuss lessons learned, both positive and negative. That's the (vegan) meat of the matter.
A word of whether all this is relevant for you: If you’re interested in meditation and/or have been practicing it for some time, I’d say this post will be helpful. If you’re undecided if you should take the plunge and start meditating, I’d also say this post is for you. If you’ve no interest in meditation, well, there’s no hope for you. Just kidding. In that case, this article can serve as a primer. In short, just read it. Pretty please.
Having said that, keep the following in mind. First, Vipassana — the one particular blend of meditation that I practiced — is one among many. So, while I'll talk about meditation in general, consider that I experienced just a sliver of all the meditation approaches out there2. Who knows, the results might differ.
Second, what I'll describe is my experience. Talking to the fellow meditators on the tenth day (the first day you're allowed to do so), it becomes clear that everyone goes through their own process. The results vary. What speaks for the validity of my claims is that:
it is already the third such course that I attended and;
I have a background in psychology, so I can look at the subject matter somewhat critically3.
With that, onward!
Describing Vipassana
There are many, many meditation practices out there. Some want you to visualize objects, some ask you to verbalize mantras, and some want you to hold weird positions. Vipassana wants you to focus on two things: respiration and sensation.
For the first three days, you practice what is called Anapana, which is simply watching your breath coming in and going out. “Natural breath, pure breath, and nothing but a breath”4: you don't need to — and in fact, you shouldn't — alter your breath in any way. But that's not all. While you go through the deadening task of simply observing your respiration, you are also asked to focus on the area below the nostrils and above the upper lip. The goal is to sense the in- and out-breath hitting your mustache area. By sensing, all the possible sensations are meant: itching, pressure, coldness, warmth, vibration, etc. Anything that you sense in that small area, observe it, and keep observing it for the period of the meditation.
After the three days are over the main technique of Vipassana is taught. In it, you try to expand your senses beyond the mustache and feel sensations throughout the entire body — from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. You do so by systematically scanning your body. Conventionally — although any order goes — you first observe your face and scan everything on it horizontally or vertically. You then move on to your throat and neck, right and left shoulders, and arms. After that, it's your torso, from both the front and the back, and your legs. Remember, any sensation whatsoever goes.
It’s quite easy to grasp. In theory. And this is probably how you imagine a Vipassana meditator at this stage.
How reality looks is quite different. To paint a fuller picture, let’s do an exercise. Close your eyes for ten seconds and try not to think about anything whatsoever - not your grandma’s hairdo, not the viscosity of cheese, nor how Hot Wheels car toys work.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Didn’t work, right? Thoughts are relentless and ceaseless, those fuckers are. They saunter in uninvited, set up camp in our mind space, and — like the one friend that we all have — stay way longer than we’d like them to. So, while you’d like to observe the respiration and/or sensations, what you’ll spend the most time doing instead is wrestling with errand thoughts.
Here’s an analogy to drive the point home. Imagine your concentration like a rubber band. At first, it’s a loose and worn-out rubber band. Nothing you can flick at people, for sure. With such a rubber band, you spend 20 minutes wondering about why donuts have a hole in the middle or the fact that Czechs consume the highest amount of beer on the entire planet. It takes forever for the loose rubber band to snap back. But as you continue bringing your mind back to respiration or scanning your body, the rubber band gets firmer, and the time for it to snap back shortens significantly. At some point, the rubber band is so tight that it snaps back nearly instantaneously — the thought arises and immediately leaves.
That’s when you achieve total mastery of your mind, ascend to the state of nirvanic enlightenment, and develop the ability to lick your elbow.
Ehm, no. But that’s the time when you begin to realize that the mind can be trained. That’s also when you realize what the phrase “monkey mind” truly means. But more on that later.
Let’s now take a look at the framework in which the meditation is embedded, starting with the timetable and followed by the rules.
Timetable and Rules
The gong rings at 4:00, after which you toss and turn yourself to a semi-awake state (it's okay if you don't do it since there's another gong — this time right in front of your window — 20 minutes later). At 4:30, you are sitting down in the meditation hall for the first bout of meditation, which goes until 6:30. I usually last until 5:30 - 45, after which I hit the bed again.
The breakfast is served at 6:305. After breakfast, at 8:00, there's another one-hour meditation group sitting. This is followed by further 1.5 hours of meditation, ending with lunch. After the lunch break, it's meditating again for 1 to 1.5-hour stretches until the tea break at 17 o'clock. After — guess what? yes! — meditating some more, the evening discourse takes place, where the founder of Vipassana6, S. N. Goenka, talks about the theory behind the practice, what you're going through on any given day, and what is to come. After that, there's one last half-hour meditation before you hit the bed at 21:00 only to repeat the same drill the next day.
As for rules, one of the biggest ones is the Noble Silence - no talking, ever (except for the tenth day). Phones are not allowed. Books are off-limits. Scribbling in your notebook is also a big no-no. You're there to meditate and meditate only.
And as you meditate, changes begin to happen. Let’s discuss them.
Wrestling with the Monkey Mind
The divide between impulsive and reflective mind widens, making you a more pleasant human being.
The most substantial change that I could watch unfold in real-time, was the widening between:
a) the instinctual, immediate, and “basic needs” motivated part of my mind, and
b) the part of my mind that's more reflected, slow-working, and higher-order values-oriented.
Dividing the mind is nothing new. For instance, Freud talked about Id, Ego, and Superego. More recently, Kahnemann and Tversky posited the System 1 and System 2 analogy (for an overview, see below). And while all these ideas have been heavily criticized, mostly because they are hard to test scientifically, I must admit that the overlap between the analogy and my personal experience became bigger and bigger with each day spent practicing7.
During the course, I could introspect much more precisely than in everyday life. Here’s an approximation of the workings of the mind: a thought appears, I then usually identify with it, and translate it into action, verbal or otherwise; "I'm hungry" leads to food preparation behavior and ultimately food consumption behavior. It’s mostly instinctual — or routine, if you prefer — no (or few) intervening processes that would stop it are present. For me, this would constitute the majority of my everyday experience: I get “hints” from somewhere that I then follow, thinking all the while I’m the one behind the driver’s wheel. But am I?
(An interesting aside here: if you entertain the idea that you actually don't control what, how, and when the thoughts appear in your mind, yet you still end up acting on them, you'll begin to question the notion of free will. Of course, without actually taking the time to observe the process of how thoughts arise and how we instantly identify with them — again and again for ten days, meditating ten hours a day — the notion is experientially weak. This leads most of us to believe (at least implicitly, through our behavior) that we think our thoughts and perform our actions. Duh. But it's only through the incessant exposure to one's mind without any other distractions that you can actually begin to feel — viscerally, like putting your hand on a stove — why free will might be an illusion.)
Practicing Vipassana, I could observe how the automatic identification with any thought is weakened to the point where I felt weirdly detached from all them; I was simply an observer in the cinema of my mind. It's a weirdly liberating experience that is — at least in my stage — quite transitory: the identification reasserts itself as soon as I stop meditating. It’s like meditation helps you stay afloat, but as soon as you stop, you begin drowning.
Nevertheless, I have begun to understand why the idea of eradicating one's ego has such a prominent spot in Eastern philosophy; it simply happens through constantly and repeatedly putting oneself in the observer position and beating the ego into submission over the years and decades of hard - hard! - mental work.
To summarize, Vipassana widens the gap between the instinctual, immediate, and “basic needs” motivated mind and the more reflected, slow, and higher-order value motivated mind (System 1 vs. System 2). I have the impression that it makes you more self-determined and refined. Where without meditation, there'd be the primacy of the instinctual mind8, slowly and with practice you can shift the balance toward the reflective mind.
Have Anger Issues? Here, Have Some Vipassana.
To set the stage for this section, I think it is instrumental to share with you a bit of background. The father's side of my family, the men especially, is full of Type A personalities9. My father, for instance, tends to hurl a bunch of expletives, which he sometimes, but not often, follows by some physical outburst. Then he proceeds to simmer in his self-righteous rage and keeps stoking the fire; whatever you do when he is in that state — a “wrong” look, a gesture, or - God forbid! an answer of sorts — sends him tumbling into glorious fury once again. Kind of like this:
When you're a child or a teenager, such behavior from an adult person - especially one so close to you as your father - imprints heavily on you.
I believe the response on the victims’ side is somewhat binary; Either you come to perpetuate the anger yourself by becoming a bully. Or, as in my case, you become timid and learn to hoard your emotions inside yourself, like a hamster that stuffs his cheeks to bursting.
Here’s the kicker though. As I get older and naturally gain gravitas in social settings10, I notice that the constraints that adolescence has placed on me, begin to dissipate: I'm more extraverted, outgoing, and unafraid. But, unfortunately, angrier as well. When something doesn't go my way, usually a small thing, I feel the anger welling up inside me. And this time, there’s no imaginary “what would others think” instance to stop me. I behave as I please, thank you very much.
Many times I stop myself before I take any physical action, but hurling “fucks” and other juicy words when the internet misbehaves or when I drop something which wasn’t supposed to fall isn’t uncommon. I lose control and regain it after a few seconds. I become anger. Given what I wrote about my father, I’m quite concerned with these developments. Anyway, here's where we circle back to the meditation practice.
Recall what you do the whole day every day during the meditation course: you focus on the sensations in your body and observe them objectively without ascribing any value to them. For instance, pain is not “bad” and tingling, pleasant vibrations are not “good”. They simply are. Basically, what you do the entire time is to rewrite the ingrained patterns of the mind which make you crave pleasant things, and be averse to unpleasant things.
I think this generalizes beyond the meditation practice. So, when you become angry and you're reaching this mindless toddler-tantrum threshold where you begin to lose control, meditation pushes it further; Where one thing used to send you into a fit of rage, now you need two (or more) things. Similarly, when you do get angry, the intensity and length of the period are diminished. You don't get as hot with rage as you used to, and the fit doesn't last as long.
I did a very unscientific “experiment” to test this. Before I left for Vipassana, I started playing God of War, a game where you need to have good reactions and proper responses to what's happening around you. If you don't, you die. So, what often happens is that you repeat a checkpoint dozens of times before you get it right. At first, you're completely outmatched. But slowly, you begin to notice the patterns of your enemies and how to properly respond to them. This is exactly the stage most conducive to anger because your goal creeps nearer and nearer: you can beat the checkpoint any time now. Also, you're way more aware of what constitutes a mistake: a misstep here, a wrong response there, and you don't have enough life to fight the final boss. I used to get so angry before Vipassana in some scenes that I had to scream into my pillow, throw it at the wall, and laugh maniacally at how ridiculous this all is.
After Vipassana, I'm a complete Zen master...
Hah, just kiddin'. I still get angry, but I've come to understand anger differently and alter my response too. With the ten days fresh behind me, anger is reduced to a sensation: it's a pressure in my chest, prompting me to act, physically or verbally. It's neutral, simply there. Such reframing — and of course the practice of Vipassana — has helped me to contain my anger.
To sum up, emotion loses its edge through practicing Vipassana. You become more self-determined and in control.
The Arbitrary Rant about Smartphones and the Quest to Regain Attention
Ever since I got myself a smartphone, it occupies a special spot in my brain and mind. When it's in my pocket, I'm aware of it. When it's on the table, I'm aware of it. And many, many cues in my environment make me think of it: I open the door to my apartment building and I observe myself reaching for the phone to fill the few moments before I reach my apartment; I go to the toilet and I start shuffling around my pockets; I wait in a line and my hands make their way to the pocket, seemingly on their own accord, and I already… review my flashcards (hah, did you think I'd scroll through Twitter or Reddit or anything so plebeian? Please! ... I do that only, like, 50% of the time. Not more, I’m sure.)
(An existentialist aside, feel free to skip: if smartphones fill all the patches between everything we do and our days become one continuous blob of activity, then the result is the eradication of consciousness: we flow from one thing to the next without ever stopping to reflect, to sit down, or to simply be and exist in nothingness.)
But cues are just the start. Similar to why the first batch of drugs from a dealer tends to be free, they are there to hook us. The real addiction starts after that with all the self-perpetuating feedback loops: if it’s is in our hands, we hop from one app to the next — in a semi-conscious stupor — until there’s nothing left to do. It’s like eating a bag of chips. Of course it’s never just a chip or a handful. It’s the entire fucking bag.
Of course, you can say that it doesn't really matter that we use our smartphones for these filler activities. After all, nobody enjoys waiting or sitting on the toilet with a can of air freshener and dissecting its ingredients. I can grant you that. But the problem is that the smartphone is greedy. Say you want to focus on an article, study for exams, or work on a presentation for two hours or more. Well, good luck not checking your phone during that time. Also, good luck with wrestling your attention back to the main task after you’ve checked your phone, be it only for a moment11.
Maybe you're better than this than me to which I'd say kudos (and also fuck off). For me, the reality remains that sustained attention has become a scarce commodity in our hyperconnected world. If there's no external pressure of a deadline of sorts, my head is in the clouds, attention exploding everywhere like confetti12.
Circling back to meditation again, I noticed — surprise surprise — that I can now sustain longer bouts of attention. The causal attribution is difficult to discern because I've not only meditated for ten days but also I haven’t touched my phone in that time. Still, it seems to me that especially the somewhat difficult and vague tasks such as writing articles like this — you know, the “icky” tasks — are now easier to get immersed in without my mind craving the occasional dopamine hit my smartphone so readily provides.
Being more attentive is cool, but dealing with pain is cooler. Let me tell you why.
Painfully Aware? Yes, Please
On the fourth day of the course, one is asked to sit in Adhiṭṭhāna: for an hour, you're not supposed to open your eyes, hands, or legs. In other words, you're not supposed to move at all13. Since you spent the previous three days wiggling about on your meditation spot to find the position that makes you the least likely to hate your existence, this completely changes the game. Because, on the one hand, you truly want to show your determination and not move at all. But also, on the other hand, you don't want to sit with an 11/10 pain in your knees, hip, and back. A dilemma.
After a few sittings, though, the task becomes easier and easier: similar to how I described anger, you also become remote from pain. It might even reach a point where you become a bit masochistic; You start delving deeper into the sensation of pain and begin to disentangle it. You begin to notice that it arises and passes away. Sometimes rapidly, sometimes sluggishly. Nevertheless, the one unifying factor is change — or as Buddhists call it — Annica. The pain will pass, sooner or later. You're there to simply observe when it does.
In real life, there are many situations in which you must deal with pain or discomfort. Sometimes, you'll be too cold or too warm. Sometimes, you'll visit the dentist. And sometimes, you’ll have to sit through Mortdecai. Whatever it is, the pain usually leads to suffering: you inflate the pain that you feel — or have felt or are about to feel — in your head.
Sitting through Adhiṭṭhāna, I obviously didn't become impervious to pain. I still very much felt it and I would still very much prefer a plush cush under mah tush (too brilliant to take out, sorry!). Still, I became more accepting of pain: when it's there, it's there. If I can avoid it, I do. But if I can't, I won’t. I don't complain or moan about the injustice of it all - the frantic “whyyyy meeee” thinking (which was quite common before Vipassana).
All this to say, through Vipassana, you develop a lassitude toward pain and other negative sensations. They just don’t bother you as much as they used to.
This concludes the psychological benefits; Vipassana helps you to be more reflective, improves your attentional capacity, and the managing of emotions also becomes easier.
What about the interpersonal benefits?
Compassion as a Buzzword or the Real Deal?
The first meditation session technically takes place on day 0. You arrive sometime in the afternoon, give away your phone and other things that you're not supposed to have, listen to the rules of the camp, and receive your meditation spot. You settle into the initial chanting and wait for the silence when the chant is over. Only, it doesn't.
You see, the person next to me had some sort of a condition, and he — for the lack of a better description — produced sounds akin to hiccupping followed by loud, irregular inbreathing. I would describe the result as mental poking.
At first, I thought this is some sort of a joke. Yet, as the time progressed and he didn't stop, I was faced with the stark reality that I'll spend the next 100 hours or so next to this dude who hiccups 1.5 m away from my ear. Not cool.
As I recounted the story to my friend who has around ten courses under his belt, he stared at me in disbelief and said: “dude, what the fuck?”
Back to the story, though. After the initial session, I went to my room contemplating how the hell am I to withstand this onslaught of random hiccupping right next to my ear. The thought of leaving the course has crossed my mind.
The next day, I got gonged awake at 4:00. I was eager to meditate but also reluctant, knowing Mr. Hiccups is going to be right next to me. In the hall, I persisted through the hiccups. And, wondrously, I came to observe a change in the attitude toward the dude as the days progressed. By the second day already, I developed a certain affinity with him, and by day three, I started cheering for him internally (his bouts of hiccups were inconsistent — sometimes it was more, sometimes less, so I surmised he has some control over it and he's trying his best to do it as little as possible).
On the fourth day, we were introduced to the main technique of Vipassana (body scanning) and Adhiṭṭhāna (determined sitting). The second the initial chanting was over I was expecting to hear the hiccups. But none came: the dude sat the entire hour without producing a whimper. I was flabbergasted: has he finally conquered the condition? I was so happy for him!
Alas, the very next session, the hiccups returned. That was, by then, fine by me. I still cheered him on. And on the seventh day, the dude was gone from his meditation spot. I felt like a part of me was missing. It turned out he was meditating apart from the group, alone in a meditation cell. Did the teacher ask him to step out? Have other students complained? Dunno. I never inquired as to what his condition was nor why he didn't join the group sittings from day seven onward.
The reason why I recounted this story is because of compassion. I've written about the concept previously and described compassion as a double-edged sword. It might be helpful in certain situations. But it might also lead to codependent relationships and the inability to cope with difficulties on one's own. But that was all somewhat theoretical: sure, I practice tough love when appropriate, but those are usually singular occurrences that happen rarely. I could practice compassion every day with Mr. Hiccups. I could observe the feeling of compassion countless times a day thanks to him. And — maybe since I couldn’t ask (remember, Noble Silence) or otherwise solve the situation —I noticed how it shifts my attitude away from tough love toward acceptance and compassion.
Although strong, this experience didn't up-end my belief structure regarding the value of compassion. I’m still a bit awkward when it comes to expressing compassion.
Still, it gave me a valuable insight into how compassion might feel to others who are perhaps of a more agreeable, loving, and harmonious constitution than myself.
Moving on.
Besides compassion, I also wrote about the power of validation, of helping people cope by being there for them. For those who haven't read the post, validation is a tool you can employ to connect with people on an emotional level. The gist is that you listen to their struggles and successes and affirm the emotion they're feeling at the moment (frustration or elation respectively) without giving them any advice. An example is when a friend tells you about her boss being a jerk today and you listen and say, for instance, “yeah, I can imagine how frustrating that must be! I'd also feel the same in your situation!” Bam, the person feels validated, the relationship is strengthened, and you both feel better about yourself. In the post, I concluded that I've had a modest amount of success with validation so far, mostly because of old habits of giving advice and having trouble identifying the underlying emotion the other person feels. How does this relate to practicing Vipassana?
The tenth day of the course marks the last day of Noble Silence and you're allowed to talk with others again. And so it was that I found myself engaged in a conversation with others and heard myself validate the other person's point of view (even though I disagreed, but more on that later) automatically! It's funny because that's how I used to dispense advice previously — also without thinking. But through the meditation practice and also through training my compassion with Mr. Hiccups — thanks, my man! — I was likely more tuned to others and could override, at least temporarily, my ingrained habits.
Besides psychological and interpersonal benefits, there was one more benefit that I could observe.
New Years Resolutions, Here I come
I don't know about you, but I tend to have a problem with doing what I set out to do. I can plan like a pro. But putting the plan into practice? Man, that's hard. You actually have to do things and not just think about them. Not cool. In psychological parlance, what I'm experiencing is usually called the intention-behavior gap.
For some people, the gap is big: those are the daydreamers and easily excitable people who often fail to consider a crucial part of any of their wonderings — the reality. For others, the gap is minuscule. Those are the “doers” among us.
I'd say I'm not entirely bad with execution, but I'm also nowhere near the top of the spectrum.
Still, I could observe that doing Vipassana has helped me in this area as well: the gap between the intention and the behavior got smaller as the time progressed. To what do I attribute such improvement? Well, despite the appearance of a sitting duck, Vipassana is quite the mental work; You're sustaining attention on a single thing (respiration), or switching attention between many things (scanning different parts of your body) without losing it anywhere along the way. (Try going mentally to the area of your crotch and see how quickly you start thinking about sex, I dare you).
There's a meta-level to this too. You not only have to work each meditation session (you can just as easily simply sit and do nothing). But you also have to show up consistently eight times a day or so, even if you “don't wanna”, are tired, or have any other excuses that we all routinely use to wiggle ourselves out of our obligations.
TL;DR: Vipassana improves your follow-through as well.
Possible points of critique
Now that we discussed all the benefits of doing Vipassana, you might be left with the impression that it's the best thing since sliced bread (or massage guns). As you might come to expect from me by now, I'm here to disabuse you of such notions. Starting with the underlying philosophy.
Situated in a religious framework
Despite being over 2.5 thousand years old, Vipassana is very scientific for its time.
First, consider the notion of "Kalapas" which are supposed to be tiny vibrating particles constituting all matter. Well, there's a proto-atom idea if ever there was any. Second, everyone is asked to find the Truth for themselves and not take anyone's - not the teachers, not even Buddhas' - word for it. It is only your Truth that is going to bring you to enlightenment. Sounds to me like empiricism upon which the entire scientific framework stands. Third, you're asked to observe your sensations objectively. Remember, no sensation is good or bad. Everything just is. And while in the strict sense nothing is ever objective, you're still doing your best (again, kind of like science).
Quite good, isn't it? What other religions believe in atoms, tell you to find your own Truth (instead of zealously following their one and only morally good doctrine), and want you to be objective? I sure can't think of any.
Having said that, all these “pure” ideas are, to me, tarnished by people's propensity to tell stories. Let me explain.
For instance, we talked about Adhiṭṭhāna, or the strong determination to sit without moving, which often leads to major pain and discomfort. Well, those major pains and discomforts aren't just that. No, silly, those are "Saṅkhāras" — or past impurities settled deep in the unconscious mind — that are coming to the surface and manifest as pain. If you let them surface and observe them equanimously without reacting to them, you'll purge them from your soul. If you react, you set a chain reaction in motion and your misery multiplies.
To me, labeling pain as Saṅkhāras sounds awfully like something that you invent for people to shut off their common sense and ignore negative sensations (such as pain). If they didn't have this story in the back of their minds whilst feeling a thousand needles being jabbed to their knees, I don't think many would consider meditation a worthwhile activity.
The purist in me has trouble accepting any story that somewhat arbitrarily tries to explain reality. The pragmatist in me is fine with that, though: I don't need to know how soap works if it does the job of killing germs.
On the same note, let's discuss the notion of past and future lives.
The concept of past and future lives
If you continue purging your Saṅkhāras diligently — ten hours a day during the course and (!) two hours each day after that — you'll be rewarded by a purer soul and be reborn into better conditions.
If this sounds like a ton of work and dedication you're not mistaken — it is.
If you’re skeptical like me, you’d ask: isn't this a little fishy? You run at people with the stick and ask them to spend a ton of time meditating, endure the presence of their minds (some would say the worst punishment ever), and bear physical pain. A big ask for sure. But it’s fine because then you give the carrot — all this is worth it because… Afterlife.
Sure, there are all the psychological and interpersonal benefits we already talked about. Those are all well and good and you can nurture and experience them quite quickly (in the span of days and weeks, not in a span of lives). Still, I feel that — similar to Christianity — there’s something dubious about the redemption from all the hardships, a place in space and time where all our efforts finally culminate into a well-earned reward. It smells all too human to me.
Again, the purist-existentialist is suspicious of such claims: I don’t think there’s any light at the end of the tunnel. The pragmatist, though, says “right on, if that makes people meditate for a tenth of their lives, we're all probably better off.”
The Issue of Morality
Despite the (oft-repeated) plea that people should find the Truth for themselves, not many heed the advice. When it comes to the issues of morality, the teachings are quite myopic. First instance. I took an interview with the teacher14 and asked him whether the strong sensations I feel coming from my heart and the thoughts about my polyamorous relationship have something in common. The teacher simply looked at me and said that I'm living an immoral life and that I need to work on my Sila (morality).
Second instance, same story. I recounted the interview to a group on the tenth day. A guy I wasn’t even talking to heard it (as if primed to listen for these things) and said that indeed, the teacher was correct to say I live an immoral life. It seems that as far as the teachings there are concerned, there's only one woman for the one man. Nothing else is permitted and everything else is immoral. The student even told me that teachers lose their positions (at least temporarily) if they divorce from their partners.
At that point it became clear to me: despite lofty ideals and insistence on finding one's own Truth, there will always be dogmatists and people will continue imposing arbitrary moral rules on others.15
Here’s where I remembered the debate between Sam Harris and Jordan B. Peterson. The gist of that discussion was something like this: Harris, a person known for his stance against religion (he’s one of the most prominent New Atheists next to Richard Dawkins) but for spirituality (he has his own meditation app), was arguing that in the 21st century, we ought to dispense with religions and focus instead on the moral qualities that they were trying to instill in people: kindness, love, compassion, etc. His reasoning is that religions failed miserably in their lofty moral aspirations — think about the crusades, the needless oppression of women in the Middle East through Islam, etc. Fair, I'd say.
Peterson's stance is a bit different. He's a religious pragmatist and tries to explain religious stories in a favorable light. The problem he has with Harris’ argument is that he does not want to “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. The baby being the religion, and the bathwater all the good (moral) stuff that it contains. He thinks — also I'd say fairly — that instilling moral inclinations in people (eg. “do good unto others”) is hard without also giving them a narrative. In other words, he thinks we can't dispense with religions and focus only on the inherent moral values (as Harris would want) because that wouldn't work: religious stories are the secret sauce that transport the moral values and make us follow them. No stories, no morality.
After having the experiences with the teacher and the student, I begun to think that Peterson is correct. I sense that many people are not capable of consistently acting morally without any underlying narrative that tells them why. They need the notion of the Saṅkhāras to bear the pain, the notion of the Afterlife to withstand the tedium of everyday sludge, and the notion of (moral) monogamy to resist the temptation of the flesh. People need to know there are unviolable rules to it all and if they follow them, good things will happen and vice versa. They to know that there's something at the end of their lives other than a meaningless death. If there isn't, why bother with all this?
Should You Go for It?
I won’t lie, doing a Vipassana course can be an ordeal. It's a deep mental exploration that peels the onion of your being and lays it bare in front of your coddled mind that you usually keep sedated by various everyday activities. As such, I can't say I would recommend it to everyone. But then again I probably would: some people will just have a harder time getting through. Those are probably the ones that need it the most anyway. Tough love.
But back to the initial question: is meditation worth something you should pursue?Having experienced three courses and looking over what I wrote, I would say: yes. The downsides are minimal, and the upsides are many. To be a Vipassana meditator is to assume an identity. And like any identity, it both frees and constrains you. The freeing parts we discussed in the initial sections about the psychological and interpersonal benefits. When you meditate, you'll likely be more reflective, attentive, and able to regulate your emotions better. Further, you'll likely feel more compassion for others and generally put your ego aside more often, which will — on average — lead to more harmonious relationships. The constraining parts include buying into a belief system (although comparably a very mild one) which might lead to a narrowing of one's admissible moral leanings: as with any religion or ideology, things are more black and white for the person who subscribes to any belief than a person who is belief-less.
I will likely attend other Vipassana courses and continue to refine my Truth. A part of me knows this to be a futile exercise. It sees it as frantically grabbing at anything that looks and feels meaningful but is “just” another device that other people have come up with to cover the meaninglessness of existence and the deliverance from suffering. It’s other people’s Truth, but not mine. But this part of me also gives me hope: if everything is more or less meaningless, how you spend your time is also. So, if you want to spend it crocheting, playing curling, or meditating, by all means — go ahead. The only one who cares is you. And your mom, of course.
As the days pass and the course slowly fades from my system, I get to experience the change unfold once again. And everything fades into the nothingness from which something will emerge once again, ad infinitum.
Thanks for reading.
Usually, a good heuristic to discern whether something is true or not, by the way.
Although to be fair, most work on the same or similar principles - focusing on respiration, staying impartial to thoughts, feelings, and sensations, working within the framework of your body, etc. So, I think it is somewhat fair to generalize.
Of course, the knowledge I carry in my noggin also influences the experiences that I'll seek out, or how I'll interpret events happening to me. It's a framework like any other: a helpful, but ultimately biased and simplified representation of reality.
Sometimes, I’ll use quotation marks when I’m repeating S. N. Goenka’s instructions that he hammered into throughout the course.
Breakfast is the highlight of the day, so it gets its own footnote. It consists of the same, delicious meal each day: porridge, sweet fruit soup (which you pour over the porridge), and in my case, 2-3 tablespoons of peanut butter. Why highlight? First off, it tastes really, really good. Second, there's nothing else that vies for your attention but the bowl in front of you: no videos on YouTube, no scrolling on social media, no talking to someone over the phone. Third, it's one of the few activities you can do besides meditation, sleeping, and taking a walk.
Goenka isn’t a founder per se, maybe a “refounder” would be a better term. Vipassana has been around for more than 2.5 thousand years dating back to Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha. Since then, the technique was forgotten and then rediscovered. Goenka was the one who helped it spread beyond Burma, where it was kept in its pure form. First to India, and then throughout the globe. Nowadays, there are hundreds of Vipassana centers.
This is funny because I lean on the other side of the discussion, which posits that we don't have any System 1 or System 2. Instead, these “drift diffusion” theories propose that our mind works simply by adding or subtracting value based on a plethora of factors (such as our attitudes, habits, social norms, etc.). Some of the mental processes are quick (System 1 like) and some are slow (System 2 like). But ultimately, they claim there's no binary distinction and everything is on a spectrum.
However we like to think otherwise, when you meditate for 10 hours a day you quickly realize that you're mostly just a bunch of basic motivations — food, sex, entertainment — that simply manifest themselves as more or less elaborate thoughts that make us feel as if we were some lofty, God-chosen self-aware beings. But in reality, we're just a bunch of apes with big brains.
Type A personality, scientifically speaking, likely does not exist. The evidence for it comes mostly from one lab and it wasn’t replicated. Anyway, it’s still a useful analogy to imagine someone who’s perpetually angry and has a short fuse.
Seriously, how this happens is beyond me. There must be some sort of instinct that makes us respect older people than us, no matter their credentials. A few wrinkles and silver hairs and whatever that person says has immediately a patina of profundity.
For a review, see the section “Mobile Technology Use and Attention” here. I don’t draw much from this since the evidence is mostly correlational and based on self-reports. Still, it’s in-line with my own experience which makes me think there’s something to it. In other words, I’m obviously biased so interpret my claims with a grain of salt.
I attribute this to smartphones. But the argument works even if you remove them as the root of all evil; feel free to substitute it with using the internet. Or, even more broadly, with content that surrounds us - shops with things to buy, agencies with enticing new experiences, fast food chains. We live in a culture of flashy novelty on every corner.
Of course, if you look at the definition, it doesn't say anything about leaning back and forth or to the side - a loophole your mind readily exploits when you sit in agony.
Anyone can sign up for those to clear up any misunderstanding regarding the technique.
This also makes sense from a psychological standpoint. The social-intuitionist model of how people perceive morality predicts this: there’s first an intuition - feels good or feels off? Then there’s a judgment: if it feels good, it is morally good and vice versa. If I then ask you to explain the judgment, there’s a rationalization. “It is morally good/bad because…”. The main point: it’s the emotion that governs what we see as (im)moral. Judgment and subsequent reasoning are based on this primary emotion. To dig deeper, look at some examples of moral dumbfoundedness and see how you’d answer them yourself.