bennopolo - Tumblr blog

bennopolo · 7 years

Text

road to enlightenment

Vipassana — a hardcore meditation boot camp

10 days in complete silence. About 80 men, 10 foreigners and 70 Nepali, confined to a space of about 40mx40m. Also 40 women, higher western percentage, but they remain completely separated from the me. No talking, no gestures, no eye contact, nothing is allowed. This communicative austerity goes under the innocent name of ‘noble silence’. Wake up bell at 4am, night rest from 9pm. More than 12 hours of only sitting on the floor and meditating — and feeling sorry for oneself. Voluntary servers are there to observe your working morale and shove food on your plate. In prison, at least you can sleep whenever you want. And you get more than just fruits for dinner (at 5pm). No food allowed on your room.

How would my friends and family characterise me? Maybe as a free mind who’s home is the horizon? As open and talkative? As an individualist who thinks that rules and timetables first of all apply to others? As somebody who has not exactly invented steadiness, patience, or continuous hard work…

So why somebody like me is doing this meditation boot camp? I was hoping for a bit more of inner peace and for a bit more of knowledge about this ominous ‘Benno’. And I got more than I wanted, so much more. But the price was pain. Uncomfortable pain for the body, uncomfortable pain for the mind, uncomfortable pain for the ego. A lot of uncomfortable pain.

I need to explain myself, lengthily. A lot of words. I am sorry about that, but for many amongst you it will be worth the pain to go through all these words. Maybe the first time in this blog I really have something important to say and you have something important to learn. I feel it as my job to translate what I consider a ‘buddhist or yogic experience’, purely subjective sensations and feelings, into an objective theory. And I like my job.

Mind and matter — mental and physical diseases

Starting point is the union of mind and matter. I believe that the spiritual forms of our mind, our analytic and emotional consciousness (and unconsciousness) sits in our body (where else?) and that there is a strong fundamental relation between mind and matter; our consciousness is encoded into our body and vice versa. Furthermore, however we interact physically with the environment, through our senses and our digestive system, it has an imprint on our mind. However we interact with our ‘awareness’ with the outside world, through all of our (conscious and unconscious) emotions, it has an imprint on our body.

Now most of you will think; ok sure; nothing new; heard that before. The common intuition that the above is, to the least, partially true is reflected in our language: I feel tensed. I feel relaxed. Stress can be sitting in your neck, weight on your shoulders, leece walk on livers (german proverb), you get cold (or wet) feet,…nothing new.

But let’s take the union of mind and matter serious. Consequently, all physical reactions of our body to the world, activity, inactivity, food, injuries, sickness leave specific traces on our mind — analogously, all mental reactions of our mind to the world, stress, relaxation, joy, anger, schizophrenia leave specific traces on the body.

Now who of you feels free of little sicknesses of age, stress, malnutrition, physical inactivity? Who feels free of recurring mental patterns such as fears, anger, aversions, urges, passions,…little demons (and sometimes bigger demons) that revoke us from mental peace. Little demons that fog the perception of our body, that meddle into our decisions, and that, ultimately, give us advices that momentarily seem right, but only extend our misery in the long run.

“I it’s bugging me, should I confront her? But I am not so sure if right now is a good moment, she could somehow take it the wrong way. Actually, it’s bugging me not soo much right now, I will wait for a good moment to speak with her about it…”— does such a line of thought sound familiar to anybody?

Who feels he or she has too much misery, too much numbness in body or mind? Too much feeling trapped by his own mind, who is doing the same mistakes over and over again while he knows better? Who feels a victim of his temper more often than he wanted? Who wants to be stronger in the face of urges and desires, who wants to have more control over his feelings? Who wants more peace, more clarity, and a more conscious feeling of his own mind and body?

It is in your own hand, but you have to work, have to work the right way.

We widely practise physical activities for better health as well as to calm the mind. They range from running to all kinds of sports, yoga, breathing exercises. And if you are too fat, running more and eating less probably works fine too a wide extend. But not always. If your obesity has mental roots, maybe addict-like patterns of complete submission to a food-craving urge in the face of exterior stress, then it is probably more affective to address obesity with mental exercise. And for anxiety, fears, and so on, probably physical exercises help on a surface level, but if you want to get to the core of the problem…

Solution to mental diseases: meditation

What kind of mental exercise? To find the most suitable one for you is as hard as to find the most suitable sport for you. Buy many ways lead to Rome and somewhere you should start. I promised a technique that brings you a more conscious feeling of your body, so probably it should involve feeling the body somehow. It should bring you more mental peace and clarity, it should make you less a slave of your demons, so probably you have to face the demons, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Some smart enlightened person has invented a genius mental exercise that is perfect mind training and achieves all of the above, about 2500years ago: Siddharta Gautama, a.k.a. “the Buddha”. It is called ‘Vipassana meditation’ and is Buddha’s main recipe to to purify the mind (and thus also the body).

In Vipassana meditation you have the conscious capability to burn through your demons: the power to exorcise yourself! The technique is as simple as straightforward: just observe. Just observe, just observe, just observe. By observation of your skin (and much, much later also the interior of your body) you can turn your skin’s sensations from numbness and gross feelings like pain or numbness into fine, uniform, soft prickling sensations. Through calm and peaceful but attentive focus of your conscious mind on your body (i.e. inwards) for a long time, you can learn to focus and ‘pleasantly feel’ every single part of your body. Every single part. And you feel where there is something wrong. And magically — or not so magically, but as a consequence of the union of mind and matter — this brings peace and order into your body, which in return brings peace and order to your future mind. You can ‘realign your body and mind’…no shit, that is what it feels like.

With the physical sensations hand in hand emotions rise to the surface of your consciousness. Unrest, fear, sadness, longing, wishful thinking, anger,…,whatever comes it comes. Evidently, if you want peace of mind you have to face the demons inside you. Like the physical pain, you welcome them, investigate them curiously (they are your demons after all), and lead them to the back door of your attention. You have better to do. You can feel yourself.

And while you continue to practise, your senses get finer and sharper. You can feel more and more subtle feelings, you can focus more precisely on certain areas. Similarly, your mind becomes clearer and clearer, more subtle in its perception, more calm and focused in its contemplation. And as you can observe your body finer and finer, you can analyse your monkey mind, the thoughts that come and divert your focus, better and better: you get to know the demons inside, you learn a lot about yourself…

So why is this meditation so good? Some more (pseudoscientific) psychology that essentially captures key elements of Buddhist philosophy:

Buddha himself was actually not too religious, but rather a first class intellectual. He wanted to know why there is suffering in the world and how we can be free of it. Of course you should do no harm to others, you don’t want them to harm you. Obvious. But if they do harm you, where do you feel the suffering? Somebody hits you, where do you feel pain? Inside you. Somebody shouts at you, where do you feel humiliation? Inside you. In the world there are always at least some unpleasant experiences you cannot escape, death for example. But the suffering, the suffering is inside yourself, thus you can control it. This is Buddha’s central message. You can control your own suffering. Furthermore, Buddha realised that through conscious equanimous observation of your (inner) sensations, Vipassana meditation, you can cleanse your mind of fears and demons (and your body of tensions and blockades) and at the same time shape it to be less susceptible to future suffering.

The mind wants joy and wants to avoid suffering. So far no problem. It is good that the mind wants that, otherwise our life would be far less beautiful. The problem is that through “unconscious sensation and emotional reaction” the mind starts identifying sensations with joy and suffering directly:

A tender kiss on your lips, the sound of a cold beer bottle opening on a hot and humid day, the praise of our peers in our ears, their clapping on your shoulders, biting deep down in this dirty juicy fat chocolate muffin. These pleasant sensation the mind identifies with joy, just thinking of it you can evoke a joyful sensation within yourself.

Back pain, being screamed at by your partner, feeling your peers disappointment when you fail their expectations, the sight of the traffic lights just turning red right in front of you. These unpleasant sensations the mind identifies with unrest and suffering, just thinking of it you can evoke sensations of tension or apathy within yourself.

Our mind then starts wanting the pleasant sensations, since they are identified with joy, instead of wanting joy itself. It is easy, he does not have to think about it. The more the experience is repeated (even if it is only in our imagination), the more our mind starts craving for the sensation. Unfortunately, similar to a drug experience, the more you crave for the sensation, the less good it is actually in the end. Joy is so etheric, you cannot grasp it with your hand and keep it close to you.

In the same way the mind starts avoiding the unpleasant sensations instead of the suffering itself. He starts to harvest less grapes and stand more upright and examine this very grape in front of you twice around, he wants to chitchat more with others, take another little pie-break,…all in order to avoid the back pain. Even though being as fast as the seasonal workers (who were not born on a vinery) is so rewarding, even though a hard day of harvesting grapes gives you a wonderful feeling in the evening and the back pain goes away after a couple of days (this example stretches to so many types of work). The mind starts to avoid the short-term pain that stands in the way of long-lasting joy or pleasantness.

In ultima ratio, the collection of identifications of sensations with joy and suffering is exactly what we call “our ego”. If you want to evict suffering from your life, detach from your ego!

But how to detach from your ego? How to stop this identification of sensations with joy and pain? Big Buddha says: “Through pure observation, free of any judgement.” Conscious objective observation of sensations allows conscious experience of joy and suffering. In conscious experience of joy and suffering both are derived from your mental state and are not automatically triggered by your sensations. And how can you (logically) convince your mind to detach from your ego? Through the crucial insight that everything is impermanent. Everything changes, in every moment, always. Nothing is worth to fear or to cling onto. This is what you have to convince yourself. Not only logically but also through direct experience. All feelings come and go, be it pain or joy. From happiness we shift to suffering and from suffering we shift back to happiness. All physical aspects come and go, be it strength, be it health, or be it money. We come and go. Even the hardest parts of our material existence, the most solid particles, are bound to decay — after the rain comes sun, after the sun comes rain again…I am smiling when it rains. When I am not smiling, it still rains.

And equanimous, objective observation (equanimous means indifferent, just without this passive lethargic touch to it) is exactly what you practise in Vipassana meditation. It is the meditation, this and nothing else. You scan your body with your attention and your try not to judge any feelings and sensations, just observe them. Whenever you start judging your feelings, start clinging onto pleasant sensations or start avoiding negative sensations, then your become less sensitive; a part of your mind becomes occupied with emotion instead of sensation. Whenever you become attached to the fruits of your efforts, fruits such as bringing feeling into numb parts of your body, dissolving gross or painful sensations into pleasant subtle uniform sensations, then you loose sensitivity. Then the fruits decay as part of your attentive equanimous mind is lost to the ego. Numbness comes as the attention weakens. Frustration over the lost sensitivity comes. Then tension and pain come again due frustration,…whenever you become attached to the pleasant feeling of clarity and calmness of your mind as a result of your practise, whenever you start feeling proud of it, then your ego becomes more powerful, then you become more angry with yourself when you make mistakes, then clarity evaporates…the only measure of your success is your equanimity, also towards the feeling of success itself. Vipassana meditation is experiencing Buddhist philosophy directly. This is what I have felt, what I have felt for 10 days, all the time.

journey into myself, where happiness lies beyond pain.

So what exactly have I experienced, that I am writing that passionate and that lengthy about Vipassana meditation?

I have felt first a lot of pain. But at the same time I had very nice encounters with my monkey mind. The thoughts that came and shifted my attention away from the meditation were more positive ones, which I had to let go, than bad suffering ones. On average. Due to the complete silence and isolation from the environment, I had plenty of peace to analyse my monkey mind. One of the voices in my head is:

“wannabe Super-Benno”: he is a generation-Y-Leonardo da Vinci who dreams of mastering science, dancing, enjoying wine and cooking, seeing the whole world, excelling at all sports, playing guitar, knowing what there is to know about politics, philosophy,…,but who does nothing with rigour, jumps from one to one dream to the next and gets already distracted by the next dream.

But the strongest voice of all is:

“wannabe Baba-Benno”: he thinks that he has seen so much of the world and loves to give people advices, advices about how to be more efficient and how to live more happy. He doesn’t like to be wrong, in fact, he never really is a 100%, only a little bit, and only sometimes. And he loves to hear himself speak…” Jaja, that one was maybe no surprise for after reading all the up to here.

But the many little demons come, and trust me, they are as at least as smart as you are: they will give you so many reasons why should stop to suffer (and to you readers they will give you so many reasons why you should not even start, why Vipassana is not “your thing”), why you should stop facing them. The strongest ones for me where:

Being stuck on such little space not being able to walk around and discover the beautiful nature around will drive me insane, I should run away…it is stupid to eat only fruit for dinner, I wake up in the middle of the night hungry, and I will loose to much weight (ridiculous thought, eating two full meals a day and fruits in the evening and doing nothing but sitting the whole day with literally minimal movement.)…I have insomnia — this one is actually the problem of my life — so if I focus too hard today I cannot sleep tonight and tomorrow this hard 15hour schedule and I will not be able to sleep again…this whole hardcore boot camp schedule is not good for me because I need breaks in between to be more efficient (and I know best when I need breaks, better than this stupid schedule…and the teachers basically just repeat Goenka’s (or Buddha’s) words in bad English: “Just observe!” and I cannot see any enlightened wisdom dripping from their mouth, so why should I follow their rules…and the pain of sitting for hours on the floor on a not-too-soft flat pillow, the pain in my head, in my neck, in my back, in my hips (especially the left one), in my knees, in my feet, in my having-fallen-asleep-for-more-than-half-an-hour-legs, every single bit was worth! Maybe not every single bit was necessary, but that is another story.

suffering is the key to nirvana

The pain, the pain, the pain is the gain…if you can embrace the pain. If you fight pain, then it feasts on you, it takes your energy. If you let your mind be dominated by the pain, then this masochism will twist your mind. But if you embrace the pain, you welcome it heartily, you examine it curiously, a kiss on both cheeks, and then you lead it to the back door of your attention and ignore it: Honey, if you manage to do that, then your awareness is sharp in the moment! The directed sensation of pain gives you hypersensitivity. This is the one and the only meaning of pain. Pain makes you come to this moment. Wherever your mind was before, when feeling pain it comes to the here, it comes to the now. Pain is there in the world, but it is your choice if you lovingly accept it, or not. And this practise trains your to accept pain and to recognise it as impermanent.

I have felt my body, my bones, my muscles, my skin, even a meridian I found by sensation. I don’t have cold feet, I sit more upright on my sitting bones, my lower back has more curvature while before it too straight, my shoulders are more free, the shoulder blades lower. When I was really down in the meditation-zone, my whole back, neck, and head lifted themselves up higher, without any effort, and my whole upper body felt so light on my hips. I never in my life felt sitting so straight than at almost 9pm in the evening of the 9th day, after 9 days of sitting 12 hours on the floor. Sitting so straight, feeling so light, a warm soft prickling sensation on the entirety of my upper body’s skin…

Is my mind more healthy now? Of course I haven’t become enlightened in 10 days, even if I am trying to sound like that, but my mind feels a bit clearer now. If I have changed for good or bad, I leave that for you to judge. Some of you will think of the above as a little crazy or spiritual. I don’t care. I had to write it.

I finish with Goethe. On my way to a conference of theoretical information scientists in Barcelona last year it was written on the wall of the university metro station:

“Es reicht nicht zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden. Es reicht nicht zu wollen, man muss auch tun.”

“It is not enough to know, you have to apply. It is not enough to want, you have to do.”

#india #meditation #nepal

0 notes