Vipassana Meditation Boot Camp

My 10-Day Meditation Retreat in 2007

From May 9^th through May 20^th, 2007, I attended an intensive (to say the least) course in Vipassana Meditation. It was insanely grueling, and one of the most fascinating and bizarre things I’ve ever done. It also seemed genuinely valuable. I had learned a lot about this course before I started, and I feel it gave me what I wanted to accomplish. I'm really glad I did this, and feel really thankful toward the people who put this together.

This all took place in beautiful deep woods on the St. John’s River, 45 minutes drive from Jacksonville, FL, surrounded by live oak and Spanish moss. S. N. Goenka taught the course via audio and video tapes, with Assistant Teachers Bruce and Maureen Stewart in attendance.

The Schedule.

4:00 a.m.---------------------Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 a.m.----------------Meditate in the hall or your own room
6:30-8:00 a.m.----------------Breakfast break and rest
8:00-9:00 a.m.----------------Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 a.m.---------------Meditate in the hall or your own room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00 noon--------------Lunch break and rest
12noon-1:00 p.m.--------------Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 p.m.----------------Meditate in the hall or your own room
2:30-3:30 p.m.----------------Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 p.m.----------------Meditate in the hall or your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 p.m.----------------Tea break
6:00-7:00 p.m.----------------Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 p.m.----------------Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 p.m.----------------Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 p.m.----------------Question time in the hall
9:30 p.m.---------------------Retire to your own room--Lights out

Yes, you read that right. That’s the wake-up gong at 4am. More than 10 hours of meditation a day. No actual food after 11am (New Students could eat fruit at 5, but I mostly didn’t).

Vipassana meditation and these courses. Vipassana meditation originated with Siddhartha Gautama (“The Buddha”) 2,500 years ago, though the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves Buddhists do not practice it. It differs from, and is somewhat opposite to, what we usually think of as meditation. It does not involve trances, mantras (Om, Hare Krishna, etc.), or out-of-body experiences. Instead, it concentrates on awareness at the present moment, both of surroundings and especially one’s own bodily reactions and sensations. Vipassana is loosely translated as “to see things as they really are”. “Really are” in this context means especially not colored by structures in your mind that have resulted from your prior experiences. In this course, you learn how to do this style of meditation well enough that you can take it from there, though they stress the need for and value of constant practice and periodic “group sittings” and touchup courses.

These 10-day courses were promulgated by S. N. Goenka (much more on Vipassana and Goenka below) and are given at no cost, including for room and board. Only when you complete the course, if you feel you want to help others do so too, are you then permitted (really) to donate. No one asks you for money directly. There’s a card table set up at the end of the course, and you can go there and donate if you care to—no one notices who does or doesn’t. They won’t take your money if you haven’t completed a course. No one contacts you later. They are serious about this: in reading the Trust minutes of the local group, I found a debate about whether including a check transfer form in their newsletter constituted “asking for money”. No one involved gets the money, either, not Goenka, not the Assistant Teachers, no one. It is used for the next courses, and a separate fund is used for this group’s modest new center being built in the woods of South Georgia.

When you complete one of these 10-day Goenka courses, you progress from “New Student” to “Old Student”. Those are the only levels there are. Old Students can donate and volunteer.

Why I did this. In the early seventies I was a pretty miserable person, extremely troubled for many years and unproductive since I started attending school. My friend Martin and my wife Elizabeth helped me understand that these problems were within me (this was a surprise), and I made it my primary occupation to educate myself and fix this. Within a few years I was happier than I had ever been, and since have almost never been miserable (nor an unproductive person).

As I explain in more detail below, what saved me were the rather mainstream principles and guidance put forward by Karen Horney (pronounced HORN-eye, lived 1885-1952), a psychoanalyst and student of Freud’s who rejected his more extreme concepts. The best one-sentence description of her guidance I’ve read is in a book I quote extensively from below:

“Through her writing, teaching, and clinical practice, Horney committed herself to understanding the self as a means to deconstructing the inner conflicts that cause psychological suffering.”

Only three years ago did I realize (again, on Elizabeth’s advice) that there was a huge intersection between the way Horney’s beliefs had influenced me, and the goals of what The Buddha taught. And a few months ago I read that near the end of her life Horney figured out the connection, and devoted her last years to it before dying suddenly of cancer. There are many scholarly papers about this connection, and I write about it below, but I had no idea of this until very recently.

I have since been learning as much as I could about what The Buddha taught. Most of it has resonated exactly with what I had learned from Horney, and even what I had evolved on my own or with the help of others since. I have seen that The Buddha’s thinking went a lot farther, and his solutions attack the same problems in a different and potentially more successful place.

So why did I take this course? I figure that, despite having led a pretty fortunate life, there’s bound to be some suffering down the road, and some additional self-knowledge and skill would be valuable in any case. Exhaustive reading and mp3 listening were getting me only so far. Besides, the meditation technique is the key component of what The Buddha taught. I wanted to learn it, and knew I couldn’t on my own. I felt that this course would firm up my knowledge (via conversation with the Assistant Teacher), and especially it would be an effective way to learn the meditation technique.

(I want to repeat: almost none of this has very much to do with organized Buddhism as practiced by most Buddhists, but it is evidently all directly what The Buddha put forth. At the end of his life, he said that all he had ever taught was the end of suffering.)

Community. I had counted on the above schedule, and knew on paper what the course would be like, but was completely unprepared for the social aspects. My first day was really shocking.

I knew about the “noble silence”. You didn’t talk, except infrequently with the Assistant Teacher, until the last day. OK, I can manage not to talk. I thought I knew about the living conditions. I had clicked on the web site of the Roman Catholic retreat center where this was held (though the course had nothing to do with the Catholic Church). I noticed that it had a sort of upscale Motel 6 on site, with nice cozy private and semi-private rooms. OK, I can handle that, too, even a roommate.

But it wasn’t in that part of the center. Instead, I found myself in the woods in a tiny, primitive barracks with 14 others on bunk beds, sharing an often-crammed bathroom with another 12 men in barracks on the other side of the bathroom—a bathroom with four toilets, eight showers and eight sinks. We would have to work out all our social systems under the constraint that “Any form of communication with fellow students, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, etc., is prohibited… Students should cultivate the feeling that they are working in isolation.” Uh, oh. Eventually, this and all the rules made sense to me. Meditating, and especially learning to meditate, are really sensitive things, and isolation is what you want. In Asia, you often get your own little cell when you’re learning, and someone leaves food at your door; here, this is the best they could do.

Still, sensible or not, you can’t imagine how primitive this was, and how crazy the life was with 27 of us jammed together and no communication of any kind. I randomly drew an upper bunk—only 4 of the 15 of us in my room had uppers, and there was no way for anyone to work out a trade. About five of us in my room were about my age, but I was the only one in an upper. This difficulty was upsetting at first, but I ended up glad to be up there. I was able to go up and down ok (it required some athleticism), and it was much more private and away from the (silent) hubbub. It did require a fair amount of planning though, because you didn’t want to make extraneous trips, and there was nowhere to store anything up there except my little backpack hung from the post. I put my suitcase under the bed of the guy below me. I did skin an elbow and get the mother of all bruises on my leg when my elbow slid off the mattress once on the way up on the first day.

It was funny to watch technology spread around the room by observation. At some point it became obvious that one guy had figured out how to get up and down better (we just had little step-stools 18 inches off the ground), and everybody started doing it his way. No more bruises after that!

Adding some tension on my arrival was that I arrived without my luggage. TSA had snagged my suitcase, containing everything for the 11 days, and I was pretty tense until it arrived a half-hour before the course began. I was tense because we were in an obscure place out in the woods—Internet mapping programs couldn’t find the retreat center, never mind our camp in the woods—and most people at our camp weren’t permitted to speak. The retreat office was closed by the time my luggage hit Jacksonville.

This was all an odd broadening of my horizons. I tried to figure out when, except for red-eyes, I had last slept in a room with anyone but a close relative, and came up with 36 years ago. Now, suddenly, 14 mute strangers.

The food. The vegetarian all-you-can-eat meals, prepared by volunteer Old Students, were wonderfully delicious, abundant in quantity, nutritious, wholesome, carefully prepared and made with love. You had to control yourself to avoid gaining weight. Sadly, after about the third day, my digestion rejected the whole affair (I blame the water, but who knows), so this was not a real positive for me. The food was an odd mixture of the familiar (most of the packaged food came from Publix and Costco), and ingredients-of-other-planets. Who knew there existed Kirkland Enhanced Organic Soymilk? And what on earth is Bragg Liquid Aminos? The label was in English but made little sense to me. Before my digestion really went crazy I tried lots of novel foods, and liked them a lot, but I eat most anything anyway.

There were lots of varieties of tea, but only a few contained caffeine. Since the point in the schedule marked “rest”, after the meals, meant “continue your night’s sleep” to everyone, I mostly had to avoid it. The tea was already put away when you got up.

Fellow Inmates. Although I have heard that more men start these courses, but more women finish, that wasn’t true here. All of the men who got past the first few hours stayed for the whole thing. I was told that 2-3 women quit on the third day.

In terms of occupation, age, and economic status, this seemed like a fairly diverse group of men. Not racially though. There were two Vietnamese in my room, 2-3 Indians in the other, but none were black or Hispanic. A few women—off in another universe a few feet away—were black, at least one was Hispanic, and several were Asian. Among the men, there was one with a scientific background a little like mine, but in the natural sciences, who worked at a government lab. There was a landscaper, a chiropractor, someone who started a small food/chemicals business, etc. One of the Vietnamese was a mechanical engineer. I found all this out on Day 10 when we could speak. I only spoke with two women enough to find out about them. One was African-American, a Harvard cum laude graduate (I learned later on the Internet), who was now a college professor with an interesting career. The other was an Hispanic graphic designer, who turned out to be the third person from South Beach at the course. That’s too many to be random, but South Beach isn’t a random place. The Vietnamese engineer told me that his wife (who was in the course) was a popular singer in the US Vietnamese community, with several recordings.

You are allowed to talk on Day 10, so that you’re not thrown out into the world a gibbering mess. As Goenka says in his recorded discourse, “On Day 10 we replace Noble Silence with Noble Chatter and the hard work will be over, because no one can learn to meditate in an environment like that”. It’s true that I’ve never seen such a talkative group of people. It was fascinating on Day 10 to finally “meet” all the people I had spent every moment of 10 days with. It was a little bit the way people describe Internet dating: you very thoroughly meet some particular slice of a person for a period, but completely miss the normal interaction until later. Some of them were 100% as they seemed, while I totally mischaracterized others. One guy seemed dour and disapproving, yet turned out to be the class clown, with a very subtle, intelligent and sophisticated sense of humor. Another guy seemed to be a lifer in the service, a little compulsive as a rule-follower, but turned out to be an ex-Marine who said he runs rescue services and was a pretty fascinating guy, not to mention anything but a rule-follower. He didn’t mention—as I found out on the Internet afterwards—that he had just retired from 20 years in the fire department of a famous small Florida city, the last four as Fire Chief. I was awed to see him slide into barracks life as if he had been doing it forever.

On the way from the airport, I rode in the shared taxi with an Italian guy in his early forties who lives just a few buildings from us, and hangs out at the beach club in our old building that gave us so much trouble. He’s an executive with a major international design firm, and a really nice guy. At some point, I looked over at him in the meditation room, and saw him, with his newly-shaved head, looking really regal while meditating. It was hard not to picture him walking down Lincoln Road a Buddhist Monk. On Day 7 I had my sickest moment from my digestive problem. He looked over at me (he later told me it was random, he didn’t know I was not doing well) and gave me a silent, seditious, inquisitive thumbs up: everything OK? I needed a human touch right then, it was worth a million bucks, and it really made me feel better. Italians have trouble following rules, thank goodness.

Everyone was very solicitous towards each other when competing for food, a sink, a toilet, etc. A silent “You go” “No, you go”, etc., often with disallowed, but unavoidable, gestures. We always worked it out, except when it came to the Older Vietnamese Guy, who always made you go first, no matter what.

Older Vietnamese Guy. The guy in the bunk next to mine (but a lower, there was no upper there) had a typical Vietnamese name (the names were on the beds). On Day 10 I learned he was 75, and in this country for only 15 years. He could pop into a perfect full-lotus position—something I could never imagine doing—in about 5 seconds. He couldn’t manage English well, and finally the folks turned up a Vietnamese copy of “The Discourse Summaries”, summaries of the 7PM talks, which I had read in English before coming. These were for him to read as we went along (you weren’t allowed to read, but he was allowed to read this). Next to him was the somewhat younger Vietnamese engineer, much more Americanized (I think he told me his four children were all physicians). They had met while sharing a ride up from Orlando. The younger guy helped out the older one with various things that required English, again being allowed to break the rules to make it work (the rules were practical, not religious).

But nobody had to help the older Vietnamese guy with anything else. For one thing, he probably wouldn’t have let you. If it was a question of whether you or he would go first, you had to. It might have actually come to blows if you insisted he go first. In general, the rules were just an annoyance to him—it wasn’t that he didn’t understand them, he was just going to do his own thing. But he was so charming (my first order of business on Day 10 was to hug him) no one could have kicked him out for being disruptive. At first, he was doing totally weird exercises. Some sort of odd Vietnamese martial art, we each separately and silently decided. Not quite like anything we’d ever seen before. Eventually, the “authorities” (that would be David, the very capable and decent course manager) stopped him, nicely, I’m sure. When we could finally talk, it was high on everyone’s list to find out what on earth that was. So 5 of us gathered around. “What WAS that?”. “Tinis” “Huh? Tai Chi?” “No, not Tai Chi, Tinis” “Huh”? Eventually he screamed TINIS!! And demonstrated a forehand and a backhand. He told us he plays tennis every morning at 9am, and he does these ad-hoc exercises to avoid injury. He demonstrated what injuries they each avoid. He said, apropos of nothing, that if he’s not there at 9am, they don’t let him play.

The rules said that to avoid disruption, you were asked to suspend any exercise regimen, and walk for exercise instead. But at 5am, in the dark, before David woke up (he worked late and slept in a small camping tent), the little gazebo with two picnic tables would turn into a seditious gym. You were supposed to be meditating then. I’m sure if people ever discover the true capabilities of picnic tables, LifeFitness and its friends will be out of business.

Religion. There were no Buddha statues, pictures, or any other physical manifestations of religion anywhere, except for a cross above the door of each dorm, and an empty iron cross holy water receptacle in the meditation hall, both due to its being a Catholic retreat center.

Online, I found this in an interview with Goenka:

Q. I gather from reading some of your talks that you don't believe in using the words "Buddhism" or "Buddhist." Why?

A. When people ask me, "How many people have you converted to Buddhism?" I respond, "Not a single one. I'm not converted myself." They say, "Don't you teach Buddhism? Aren't you a Buddhist?" I say, "No, I don't teach Buddhism. I'm not a Buddhist."

And elsewhere, I found, “While it is the essence of what the Buddha taught, it is not a religion; rather, it is the cultivation of human values leading to a life which is good for oneself and good for others.”

It is certainly true that there was no physical sign of religious doctrine anywhere, there was no belief in gods or supernatural beings, and only a little of what I would regard as supernatural phenomena (and which I’m sure they do not regard as supernatural). In fact, the whole philosophy is at odds with the concept of anything supernatural. This was stressed to be a psychological practice, with the aim of teaching you how to be happy from the inside.

They say, in the one written document we were given at the start (which had mostly the schedule and code of discipline), “People from many religious denominations have experienced the benefits of Vipassana meditation, and have found no conflict with their profession of faith.” This could well be true, but I think someone with a strong identification with an organized religion might feel uncomfortable during a few of the discourses. Goenka told some humorous and on-the-mark stories that put some of the beliefs and practices of organized religions, including Buddhism, in a rather poor light. You might say a little mockingly, but not cruelly so.

He’s also a selling a little. In the document I refer to above, he also says, Some people have great attachment to their belief, and if I say, "First break your belief and then come to me," who will come to me? Nobody will come to me. Therefore, I say, “Keep your belief and work.” As they work, they realize, "This is truth and our belief is far away from the truth." Then automatically they come out of it. They may not condemn that belief, and I don't want anyone to condemn anything, as I'm not condemning anything. But the truth is there, which becomes so clear: “This is the truth.” So the problem gets solved.

Despite the claims to the contrary, they did have rituals in places. One of them was particularly prevalent: Goenka chants at the end of meditations and discourses, “May all beings be happy” three times (all the chants are in Pali, the language of The Buddha). The audience responds, very slowly, “Sadhu, Sadhu, Sadhu”, which is essentially “Amen, brother”. I found it a little creepy (but didn’t mind doing it myself). There was a very self-conscious sign in the dining hall explaining what it was all about, saying that it wasn’t a “rite or ritual” (I don’t see what else one could call it), and that no one was expected to do it. I think they confuse rituals with religion. (I have rituals when I sit down to breakfast, myself). 
One also bowed in thanks, also described as “no one is expecting you to do so”.

Again, in that same document, Q. Are there any ceremonies or rites in your community? A. What community? For those who meditate, the only rite or ritual is that they meditate and observe what is happening inside. There is no other rite or ritual.

Another ritual was that the Assistant Teacher (more later) sat cross-legged on a low platform, and one sat cross-legged below him to converse. I was confident that this was a ritual show of respect (after all, it doesn’t indicate real respect, which I did feel in this case), and that Bruce would have been perfectly happy to switch places—no ego. I just kneeled, since I was avoiding twisting my knee. It was fun to kneel and talk to someone on a platform, and good ego-destroying practice.

Goenka certainly has beliefs that I think fly in the face of modern physics. The worst by far is continuing The Buddha’s belief in reincarnation, which was the prevalent world-view in The Buddha’s time. Goenka does two things: gives an explanation of how this isn’t necessarily supernatural (I don’t agree), and he specifically goes out of his way to say that there’s no reason to believe in it. (In fact, at the end of the course he more generally says there’s no reason to believe in or do anything you disagree with—pick and choose as you please, as long as you benefit). There were other smaller things as well. Most of them I wrote off to a reading of popular physics with a wishful eye, and none mattered one way or the other. There was the desire that all these things have a scientific basis, but I don’t think they care that much. I didn’t either—they were all tangential things as far as I was concerned. I have several friends who would be driven crazy by this, and that used to be true of me. But I’ve seen so much benefit from the rest, and this seems so irrelevant, that it feels like a small price to pay.

Online there are several discussions of whether this is a cult (among them are some good trip reports). To me, it is silly to think of it as a cult, especially given the financial aspects and the intentional disorganization and lack of community (and the privations, another reason to suspect a cult, now make 100% sense to me). I write more about this below when I discuss Goenka, since his degree of control of the course is the most cult-like aspect.

My nasty problem. At the end of Day 2, I was sure that I would have to quit the next morning, and I was despondently planning the logistics (Goenka says that most people quit after Days 2, 5, and 6). On Day 1 I started getting really good at the initial stages of meditation, which involve focusing your mind. This brought on two things. First, I had strong emotional reactions (I started sobbing happily while for whatever reason first remembering telling the “Fredrick the Pigeon and His Sister Fredrick” stories to my then eight-year-old daughter in Venice, and then remembering teaching my son data structures on a car trip when he was 14, and then Elizabeth’s pointing me at this path). The other thing that was brought on was a persistent headache.

During the break at 7pm, I walked out into the light (the meditation hall was pretty dark) and was hit by a really nasty migraine aura. Ugh. Migraine auras (mine, at least) are pinwheel visions in both eyes that often precede migraines. This was my sixth aura in 10 years, one of which led to a migraine (and I never want to have another migraine, thank you), and another I cut off with medicine. The other three hadn’t led to migraines. I had the medicine with me, but didn’t need it. I was able ride this out.

However, on Day 2, the headaches returned. Eventually I learned that I could bring on the beginnings of a migraine aura by applying my new-found skill, and focusing my attention on my eyes. It was freaky, and really unpleasant, but at least I could open my eyes, or divert my attention to elsewhere, and make it go away. I signed up for an interview with Assistant Teacher Bruce, in case he had something to offer, and to discuss the fact that I might take the medicine if a real migraine loomed. He had psychological explanations for why this was happening that were completely rational and sane, but that I thought (to myself) were unlikely to be the problem. I could see that I was doing difficult physiological things with my facial muscles, and I believe that was more the problem. This was a bad situation, since I didn’t want to get a migraine, and I especially didn’t want to be training myself to bring them on!

In any case, I woke on Day 3, after just 3-4 hours sleep, with no sign of any of this. I was truly relieved to not have to quit. The problems recurred a little each afternoon for about three more days, but to a diminishing extent.

That was the only time quitting ever crossed my mind. The irony of my problem was not lost on me: Goenka went down this path when, as a rich Indian-extraction Burmese businessman, he had crippling and unsolvable migraine problems. When he traveled for business, he went to the best specialists, and no one could help. His migraines were declared incurable. He finally was persuaded to take one of these courses with the man who became his teacher, U Ba Khin, and never had another migraine. This influenced him to make these courses his life’s work (though reading his description of his early history makes clear that he had interests like this long before).

Down time. Although I stayed awake and tried during the whole 10 hours of meditation periods a day (except for a nap on Day 2 during my migraine problem time), I certainly couldn’t meditate that whole time—I doubt any New Students could. To occupy my mind when meditation was impossible I, totally mentally: wrote a version of this report (a much briefer and wittier one, you can be sure), planned completely the radical first two lectures for my course in the Fall, did a detailed biographical timeline of my life as requested by my son, and listed steps that I hope might improve my father’s living situation (in this last case I even invented a mnemonic scheme to help me remember all that I had thought up). I don’t know what percentage of the time I actually practiced meditation, but I did all I could do, physically and mentally, and it worked to teach me what we were there to learn. I suspect this was not an unusual experience.

I tried to avoid doing any of this during the “group meditations”. These three one-hour periods each day (the group meditation from 8:15-9:00pm was different) were special. Starting on Day 4, when we were taught Vipassana meditation itself, rather than the preliminaries, these became meditations of “strong determination”. For those, everyone was there, and we were to go the full hour without opening our eyes, or parting our hands or legs (this was a little less onerous if you were in a chair, as I and several of the other older people were, but still tough). It did lead to much better meditation. In one of his discourses, Goenka said more-or-less, “After a while, you’re sure that the idiot has forgotten to set the alarm, and so you cheat and peek, and find that only 45 minutes has gone by. Then every minute feels like an hour. Finally, the chanting begins (that signifies that the end is near). What sweet singing! You’ve never heard anything so melodious!” (He’s picking on himself here, it’s pretty horrible and he knows it. But you sure are glad to hear it.)

After a while, when my meditation improved, the hour didn’t seem so bad, and I would lose track of time.

Out of touch with the outside world. I don’t think Elizabeth and I have been out of touch, at least verbally, for more than 2 consecutive days in 42 years. Now, not only were she and I out of touch, but I had no contact with the outside world at all. I saw at a distance maybe three people who weren’t part of our course: two going by in cars, and one worker on a lawn tractor.

I had given Elizabeth a ghoulishly detailed list of circumstances and principles to help her decide whether to contact me at the emergency phone number in the kitchen. (There is a coup and Erik Prince is the new President and Supreme Commander, yes. A terrorist act kills more than 300 people in the US, yes. Al Qaida sets off a dirty bomb in Cheyenne, WY, no, and so on.) It turned out that there was wonderful and significant family news (I’ll preserve people’s privacy and not say it here), and Elizabeth was vexed with the question of who to tell vs. who to leave for me, but she knew not to call me with it.

Several couples took this course together. It was genuinely touching to see them parting in public. They would somehow have to endure being a few feet apart but not being allowed to communicate.

We were constrained to a small area about 1½ times a football field. This was done via a boundary of strings, looking a lot like what the Orthodox Jews do to make a public area part of their virtual home (so that the Sabbath rules that apply at home apply there). This enclosed our separate walking areas, and four buildings: the men’s and women’s dorms (separated by the string and a no-person’s land), the dining hall (separated into two parts, men’s and women’s, with an opaque tarp between), and the meditation hall (separate entrances for men and women, but just a masking tape corridor on the floor separating us). During the lunch rest, on around Day 6, I was sitting at the picnic table on the edge of the property when someone started to practice the piano from, I guess, a nearby house. It was heaven. This woman—I don’t know why but I’m sure it was a woman and I’m sure she was playing an old upright—was playing flawlessly mostly chordal accompaniment to church hymns for 15 minutes, and then half an hour of Bach, not so flawlessly, but with wonderful feeling. Given that by then I had found myself humming the horrible-sounding Pali chants that accompanied some of our meditation, you can only imagine how fabulous this was for me. I went back there every day after that at that time, but no luck.

Except for the food manager, and maybe one other person, all the kitchen volunteers meditated with us during the “group meditations”; their schedule was arranged to allow this. I heard at the end of the course that this is a difficult thing to do, because one went from being in-touch, and bustling, to meditating. I was told that one of the kitchen staff went to a local mom and pop grocery to pick up some things, and was idly asked at checkout what kind of party this odd collection of food was for. The person explained briefly, and was told, “Well, you don’t need to come back here again.” Welcome to the Deep South. I’m sure Jacksonville itself is now different. I was last there in 1964, and I remember seeing separate “colored” and "white" drinking fountains in the Florida panhandle while driving from New Orleans. Anyway, they said it wasn’t easy to get your mind around meditating for a while after that incident.

The Buddha’s Little Insomnia Cure. About a year ago, I realized that I now sleep so well (due primarily to getting so much sunlight, I eventually figured out, though my retirement helped too), that I had to drop my lifelong practice of referring to myself as an insomniac. But at the start of this course, I could barely sleep. I was too agitated or excited or uncomfortable, I guess. I figured that when I got exhausted, and this was sure exhausting work, I’d sleep better, but I didn’t. It just got worse and worse.

At some point, maybe around Day 6, Goenka said in the discourse, more-or-less, “When you have insomnia, you know it’s 1am, 2am, 3am, and you can’t sleep, you should think about this. Sleeping is a process meant to rest the body and rest the mind. So lie down as comfortably as you can, resting your body. Now, you’re expert in calming your mind. So do so, and give your mind some rest. Even if you don’t fall asleep, you should be confident that you’re getting most of the benefit. And you’ll probably fall asleep anyway. This is all The Buddha ever did after his enlightenment, and just for 2-3 hours a night.”

So, that night I did it, and, bang, I fell asleep in about two minutes, and the morning gong woke me up for the first time. Weird as it sounds, it’s now almost 2 weeks later, and this has continued to work perfectly. I have a really active mind. In general, it’s difficult for me to do one thing at a time (I have to do something like play solitaire on my computer during a conference call or my mind will go elsewhere). My mind isn’t agitated, but it is frenetic. Calming my mind, which as Goenka said I’m now really good at, seems to be useful in getting to sleep, which stands to reason. And now I consciously scan my body for comfort right before calming my mind as I fall asleep.

The Assistant Teachers. In the dining room was a small sign that said “S. N. Goenka has sent Assistant Teachers Bruce and Maureen Stewart to this course to help in learning Vipassana.”

Their jobs were: to sit in front of us and meditate during most of the time we were meditating, to control the audio and video of Goenka (although David ran the VCR for the discourses), to approve whatever variances from the rules were needed, to announce what would happen during the non-group meditations, to do “checkups”, and to be there to answer questions. Somehow, Bruce could meditate for the longest time without seeming to move a muscle. Maureen had a couple of different postures she used, but was otherwise completely still. They both seemed friendly, low-key, decent, seemingly ego-less, and smart. During the course, they lived in rooms in the back of the meditation hall, and we never saw them outside the hall until the course was over, except that I saw Bruce walking back from a walk in the woods on one occasion, and Maureen on another. Bruce is a New Zealander, and Maureen sounded American, but I didn’t hear her speak loudly enough to be sure of her accent.

Men interacted with Bruce in various ways. One could sign the interview sheet in the dining hall, and get one’s share of the hour from 12-1, depending upon how many others signed up. The interviews were “private”, except that Maureen was always interviewing a woman 10 feet away, and David sat way in the back ready to Gong you out. One could also stay around at 9pm, after the last meditation, and ask questions in public. In reality, Bruce stayed around after many meditation sessions and was happy to answer questions. Finally, about 4-5 times Bruce announced at the start of one of the longer meditation periods, “The New Students will stay in the hall for checking”. He would then call us up in groups of four, and ask everyone the same very highly formulated questions. For example, “Josh, are you able feel sensations when you …”. He then would dispense advice based on what you answered, or he would ask further questions and then do so.

It seemed like a good system. The teaching is purposely designed to be extremely efficient, no extra words, but nothing left out. Goenka wants to do it exactly as he knows best, and so wants the basic teaching done by himself. But he needs people to carry out these functions, and these two seemed quite capable. Bruce was happy to have rather Talmudic conversations with me, you can only imagine, and give intelligent and satisfying answers.

Meditation and the wave. I was relieved and a little surprised to find that I did indeed learn Vipassana Meditation. It came on slightly on Day 7, and strongly on Day 9. Now I can make myself feel a pleasant, very fine wave of sensation, as if coming from a hoop around me going down slowly from my head to my toes, and then back up again, over and over. I call it the wave, because it is just like the wave going through the stands of a sporting event, at least to me. More properly you are said to be “scanning” your body, and you are, feeling sensations that are said to have always been there, all over your body. I will learn over time how to do this better, and how to touch parts of my body more randomly than I just described, as well as more inside, besides on the surface. You are supposed to be able to learn all that over time, and I can already sense while meditating that I will.

I had heard that this is somewhat sensual, and indeed it is, for me much more than somewhat. But! The “neurotic structures” (Horney-speak), or “sankaras”, that one is trying to lose occur in part as a result of craving. So you’ve learned this pleasurable thing, but you better not want it too much (oh, thanks). In particular, really wanting it, and pressing to bring it on while meditating, when you are particularly vulnerable, is setting yourself up for untold misery (oh, thanks a lot, really). I think it’s a common theme in science fiction/fantasy that one is given something really wonderful, but you’d better not use it too much or let it go unfettered (Gremlins? Star Wars?).

In other words, I need a T-shirt that says, “Don’t crave the wave”.

Why meditate? I have tried to figure out all the potential benefits of Vipassana meditation, those that are claimed, or things that have occurred to me. After each, I’ve written my own little commentary on the claimed benefit.

Here is my list:

1. At the moment that you are upset about something, or craving something, it is a place you can easily go to (because you have been trained), that shows you what the reality of the situation is. Is anything actually bad happening right now? Not really. So, take it easy and plan rather than react. Reacting is doing you harm. You are reacting because of things that happened before, not because of what’s happening now. Clear-headed planning is what is best for your happiness. This is the “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy, except it is real and beneficial. You are not suppressing your upsettedness, you are rather seeing what’s really going on, and getting less upset because, honestly, nothing bad has really happened. It is remarkable what percentage of upsetting events fall into this category.

I experienced this benefit before the course, just from doing regular meditation on my own for 20 minutes every day for several months. I did the beginnings of Vipassana, basically following my breath (it is called Anapana), though I believe everyone in the course surpassed where I had gotten, just in a few intense hours, as did I. But it was already enough to be able to use this technique in this exact way many times to my benefit. I could go on and on about this. It is an extremely helpful tool to add to one’s daily life.

2. Like #1, but what Vipassana lets you do is see, by knowing your body reactions, that you are having some reaction. Those who are not meditators do not see the reactions in time to do anything about it. Once you know you are reacting, you can stop and think about the situation, and let the anger (or whatever) pass.

I can believe this, and it was probably my main motivation for learning Vipassana, but I am not skilled enough to know yet whether this is really something that happens. What I have seen already makes me expect it to be true eventually. I do know that the American trait of letting it all hang out isn’t the right path, and neither is repressing the emotion.

Goenka says (for example): You need a private secretary to remind you whenever anger comes. This private secretary will only work an eight-hour shift, and you have no contract with your anger only to come when your private secretary is on duty! You may need three private secretaries or four or five private secretaries. Well, assume that every moment you have a private secretary nearby. And when anger arises, the private secretary calls out: "Look, sir: anger! Observe the anger!" The first thing you will do is to shout at him or slap him: "You fool! Are you here to teach me? I know what to do!" Anger is anger, after all! Suppose [instead] you behaved properly, and thanked him: "You were kept for this purpose. You advised me well. Now I must observe my anger." How will you observe it? Anger has no shape or colour. If you try to observe it with closed eyes, you will only observe the object of your anger, the person or the incident, which made you angry. It keeps repeating itself in your mind, and stimulating your anger, making it worse. You are not observing anger. This is why enlightened people taught observation of respiration and sensations.

3. It is a pleasant, comforting and relaxing feeling, accessible almost any time as one’s technique improves.

I can see that this is undeniably true.

Now we get more subtle, and perhaps controversial:

4. The process makes you see intuitively that things are impermanent, at least by analogy to the sensations you feel while scanning. Itches that you are sure will kill you if you don’t touch them somehow manage to go away. Almost everything you feel arises, and then passes away.

I can believe that this intellectually reinforces this general truth. Life is impermanent; that’s one of the most fundamental truths of The Buddha. We live our lives as if things are permanent. There is the more significant claim that it also subconsciously teaches this. I would phrase this as “the recognition of the impermanence of things becomes second nature to you”. In other words, meditation changes your outlook on how permanent everything is, not just intellectually.

This more significant claim stands to reason, I don’t know if it’s true.

5. The process of meditation causes the sankaras (the “neurotic structures” left behind by craving, aversion, fear, etc.) to become uprooted and leave the body. They are the cause of many of the gross sensations you feel while meditating.

You do feel these gross sensations, but I have a very hard time believing that this is the cause of them. If it is, great. Maybe someday I’ll find that out. But for now I’m a skeptic.

But I have another theory, which I also don’t know the truth of, but seems more likely to me. Perhaps those who become very skilled in this meditation have a subtle personality change as a result of the meditation. Personalities change through drug use, after all, why not through this. Perhaps those who do Vipassana lose whatever compulsions cause us to hang onto these sankaras, and they lose their hold on you, sort of as a mellowing process.

I believe that #2 and #5 are the main motivations given for doing this, with #1 and #4 in second place.

Whatever the actual story, I have little doubt that one benefits from Vipassana meditation.

Random stuff about the meditating experience. You could see a horrible cold spreading through the women’s side of the meditation hall, or rather hear all the hacking and coughing, a little at first, and then a full chorus. I’m sure when we mingled on Day 10, half the men caught this. I never get bad colds, but, wow, this was a whopper after I got home.

You were assigned a place in the meditation hall, and that became your piece of turf for the whole course. I had requested a chair, and so I was on the side, which, like my upper bunk, was good for avoiding all the comings and goings during the open meditation periods. We left our meditation stations set up permanently. The men’s were pretty Spartan, but the women’s were generally much more elaborate, with huge quantities of stuff. They looked pretty comfortable, actually. I had brought a thick towel that I expected to, and did, fold up and pad my chair seat with. But in the flotsam and jetsam pile of random meditation supplies in the back of the hall I found an airline-style blanket, and a square of egg-crate foam of the kind used for bed padding. All of that together made for a much more comfortable seat. One of the Old Students, the chiropractor, who was an old student in both senses, sat directly in front of me. He had brought his own Lyre-back folding chair. It filled me with craving.

S. N. Goenka. Goenka himself is an interesting character, and there are senses in which it is hard to know what to make of him. What I do know is that I’m eternally grateful to him for what he’s done, and I wish for his teaching to be ever more popular. The oddest thing is that he insists on teaching the course himself. Of course, he’s 83 now, and there are a jillion courses, so that’s not going to happen. But he won’t trust anyone else to do it. He says that’s because he’s seen what has happened to both the teachings and the teachers when his former students started giving classes themselves, and he hasn’t liked what he has seen. So he has videos for the discourses, and audio for the instruction and chanting given during meditation (mostly the meditation time is silent, but that is also when the instruction is done, and when he sometimes chants). And he has trained a large number of Assistant Teachers (I’ve heard 700; Bruce and Maureen are at the highest rung of them, I’ve read in the newsletters).

He is a charismatic speaker, with a wonderful sense of humor and delivery (I’m sure he could easily sustain a half-hour show on Comedy Central). He is self-effacing, and seems prepared to speak the truth about anything. His selling, and he believes in this product, appears to come from the heart. His motivation seems genuinely to be that he wants everyone on the planet to benefit from this.

So why does he insist on doing the teaching himself? There seem to be several possible reasons:

1. It’s as he says: it’s the only way to get it done right. His students will have egos (for the sake of this argument we’re assuming he doesn’t), and will put their own mark on this, while what he is doing is teaching the pure product, from The Buddha, preserved in Burma for all these centuries, and/or

2. He’s a control freak, and/or

3. He has a massive ego, and wants to be known as the guy who did this without sharing the glory, and/or

4. He actually wants to be worshipped himself, and this is The Cult of Goenka.

I don’t personally believe either #3 or #4 is true. I could understand how looking in from the outside these would be easy to suspect, and they’re certainly possible. But my strong intuition, having heard him lecture in about 20 one-hour podcasts, and listening to all his discourses, and reading his books, is that neither one of those is even close to true.

I do believe he’s a control freak, almost by definition, but that it is really due to #1. Who is to say? I could not argue with anyone who believed in #3 because of #2, on the evidence, even though I don’t.

He also does the chanting. Unlike his speaking style, his chanting is pretty ugly (he kids about this himself), but he says it is there to help the meditator. Why does it have to be him chanting, though? My guess is that he feels it is important to hear the instructor himself chanting, which might make sense. Still, I think he should hire a cantor.

Karen Horney and me. Above, I wrote about how in the early seventies I became convinced that my misery was within me. My response, being the researcher type, was to go to our local branch library, and to start reading, or at least skimming, the whole psychology section. I plugged away, and learned a lot about the subject. A lot of it was interesting, but none of it really resonated until I eventually got to “H” and a book by Karen Horney. I was stunned when I read her stuff: “This is me she’s describing!” Horney believed (as a few others have in the past century) that we are not controlled by instincts, as had been popularly thought, and as Freud particularly proposed, but that we are controlled by neurotic structures that we build up over time out of fear and other negative experiences. She believed that, at our hearts, the “real self” would be a happy, compassionate person, but the “idealized self”, the one that comes out through the neurotic structures, suffered from the “inner conflicts” inherent in these structures.

Reading Horney’s description of these inner conflicts (eventually, I felt her best book was “Neurosis and Human Growth”), it was immediately obvious that she was describing the feelings I had that were making me so miserable. And so, during the four years from about 1973 through about 1976, I essentially dedicated myself to self-awareness. That is, I tried to see how my behavior and reactions were influenced by this structure, in order to lessen their hold on me.

This immersion was very complete. I had jobs and went to school during those years, but I never lost sight of Job One. I read a lot, wrote a lot, and thought a lot. I got help. I felt tremendous ritual and dedication in my effort. When I mentioned Karen Horney to friends, few of whom had ever heard of her, I had to explain that I had not joined a cult, nor was I involved in some weird experimental psychological thing.

Horney didn’t offer a lot of practical advice on how to deconstruct these structures in her writings—it basically boiled down to: get therapeutic help in getting to know yourself, see what’s going wrong, and then a lot of things will go away. And it was true; understanding the mechanism was incredibly helpful to me. I learned to stop being down on myself for my problems. I saw what I was doing: trying to live up to ideals and false images, answering to fears, wants and pride instead of reality. In time, by trying hard for humility, by concentrating on my real strengths, not those I thought I should have, and by concentrating on spotting the things that were most troubling to me, I started getting a lot happier.

Ever since, I have dedicated myself to this road, which I always have described as self-knowledge. It, unlike anything more tangible, has led to my happiness—even to that part of my happiness that comes from tangible things.

Now zoom forward to somewhere around 1998. Elizabeth had for some time been learning about the psychological aspects of Buddhism, and she told me that this Buddhist stuff was right up my alley. She handed me a Jack Kornfield tape. I honestly didn’t know Jack Kornfield from Bernie Cornfeld from Jack Canfield, and I was very confused about what oddness Elizabeth was talking about. The tape sat on my dresser for many years. In 2004, I finally listened to it, and then much more of the same, and I noticed how right she was.

I then started some degree of immersion into understanding all of this, but it wasn’t until I retired in 2006 that I really started studying intensively. I was very surprised at the correspondence between where I had gotten to after all these years, and much of what I read and heard. I was even more surprised to see how much more there was in this area that was well-understood, along the same path, and as sensible as what I had been taught and gotten to on my own.

The connection between Horney and The Buddha. In December of last year I decided to write out some of the connection I had seen. As a first step, I looked on the web to see whether anyone else had noted it. I was genuinely stunned to find that Horney herself knew, but only at the end of her life. I had no idea of this.

It turns out that in about 1950 Horney became interested in Zen Buddhism. After completing what would be her last book, she traveled to Japan and stayed at a series of Zen monasteries in search of further development of her concept of the real self.

It is natural that the Buddhism Horney encountered was Zen. Until after World War Two, knowledge of Buddhism in the US was generally limited to scholars (and, obviously, the Asian communities). Then, the post-war connection between Japan and the US brought Zen to people’s consciousness—it eventually caught on with the beat movement, and now the US has more Zen Buddhists than any country but Japan. In similar circumstances, today, she would be more likely to encounter what I am learning about.

Her biography, “Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis” by Jack Rubin, makes it clear that Buddhism was a dominant theme in her last two years (she died suddenly of cancer in 1952). She recognized the strong connection between it and her work. In my opinion, it was unfortunate that it was Zen that she encountered—it has considerable complexity that clouds the very obvious connection between what The Buddha developed, and what she did. Ultimately, I'm confident that the parts that resonated with her own theories are essentially the same in Zen as they are in the "purer" Buddhist teachings, but Horney spent much effort in trying to understand this Zen complexity from a psychiatric point of view. I don't know enough about Zen to understand what, if any, psychological value the added complexity offers. If one simply considers Vipassana and what stems from it, though, Horney's inner conflicts are analogous to the structures (or "sankaras", quaintly called "impurities" in English) that Buddhists of all stripes say govern people's behavior. I haven't read any other traditional psychological literature that corresponds to The Buddha's views as closely as Horney's does.

There has been a lot of study of this phase of Horney's life. The book, "Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis: Readings in Contemporary Theory" by Donald Capps and Janet Liebman Jacobs contains a paper by Marcia Westkott called "Karen Horney's Encounter with Zen"; here is the introduction (the underlined parts are my own emphasis):

In the summer of 1952, the German-born psychoanalyst Karen Horney traveled from her home in New York City to Japan to tour the major Zen monasteries in the company of her host D. T. Suzuki, the renowned interpreter of Zen Buddhism to the West. A pilgrimage of sorts, Horney's trip was the culmination of her deepening interest in Buddhism. She had cited Suzuki in her last two books and had met with him in the winter of 1950-1951 while he was on a lecture tour in New York. Unfortunately, Horney never had the opportunity to develop fully her encounter with Buddhism. Soon after her return, she was diagnosed with cancer; two months later, at the age of sixty-seven, she died.

Horney's interest in Buddhism at the end of her life was not idle curiosity but the discovery of a philosophy that resonated with her own life's work. Through her writing, teaching, and clinical practice, Horney committed herself to understanding the self as a means to deconstructing the inner conflicts that cause psychological suffering. The earliest stirrings of this quest led her away from conventional Christianity to Freudian psychoanalysis and then, more self-consciously, away from Freud's theories to her own creative work. In Suzuki's writings, Horney discovered ideas that validated her own theories and challenged her to think about the self in new ways. Although we shall never know what might have come of Horney's encounter with Zen had she had more time to pursue it, we can—by examining her spiritual and intellectual search—consider the ways in which Zen Buddhism began to change her thinking.

From later in the paper, “Most obvious to the reader of the Final Lectures is the admiration that Horney held for the Zen quality of being wholeheartedly in the moment.” I have now read the relevant parts of the Final Lectures (thank you Google Books!), and her clear understanding of and resonance with the concept of being in the present is very striking. Vipassana is about being in the present.

I don’t want to make more of this than is there. Horney and The Buddha both saw the compassionate inner self, and both saw the structure that one manufactured and the “tin image of oneself that one keeps shining” (as Goenka says). They really shared the exact same model. And both felt that the cure was to get rid of the structure, and let the real self come out. But Horney’s solution was different from The Buddha’s. She felt that you analyzed the structure, from the top, and in so doing weakened the structure until the real self could emerge. The models she provided were powerful, and they help tremendously in that endeavor, as I can attest. The Buddha emphasized instead a technology to shake the structure loose from the bottom, thus allowing the real self to emerge. It’s an impressive technology, and even before starting this course I found a positive effect from it (my reason for meditating #1 above).

Despite these differences, it’s seriously spooky for me to see this recognized connection, previously unknown to me, between something that was so important to me for so long, and something that has so gotten my attention today.

The Buddha and psychology. I’ve intentionally avoided trying to explain in any depth the psychological teachings of The Buddha, as I understand them, though the discussions above of meditation and Horney’s teachings give some flavor. Any such attempt would certainly discuss the concepts of The Dhamma (what Goenka teaches and The Buddha taught), karma, impermanence, craving, aversion, pleasure, pain, anticipation, avoidance, vibrations and so on, as well as questions of ego. Until recently I would have regarded most of these as new-age-type mumbo-jumbo, but as I understand them better I find they are no such thing. My short conversations with Bruce (at Bruce’s feet, literally) helped clear up some of my confusion on a few of these concepts, and I have a pretty good amateur grasp of the subject, I think.

I’ve avoided doing so in part because it’s an incredibly big, well-documented subject that I couldn’t begin to do justice do in an essay like this, even if I were qualified, and I’m not. Also, without way more space than I could apply, the uniqueness and depth of the subject would be lost. I find that this is common in the social sciences. Any superficial discussion leads people to say, “of course, everybody knows that”. On the surface, most sensible things are obvious in retrospect. It’s only when the depth and details emerge that one sees the sophistication.

I want to give some flavor, though, so I’ll chance all of the above just a little. This is a summary from a small part of Goenka’s Day 7 discourse, it’s on “who owns misery”. It’s pretty fundamental to the way of thinking. Again, it can sound like obvious advice, or, worse yet, it can sound like one is being given the advice to suppress anger (instead of eliminating it).

Seeing from only one angle, one imagines that one’s suffering is caused by other people, by an external situation. Therefore one devotes all one’s energy to changing others, to changing the external situation. In fact, this is a wasted effort. One who has learned to observe reality within soon realizes that he is completely responsible for his misery or happiness. For example, someone is abused by another person, and becomes unhappy. He blames the person who abused him for making him unhappy. Actually the abuser created misery for himself, by defiling his own mind. The person who was abused created his own misery when he reacted to the abuse, when he started defiling his mind. Everyone is responsible for his or her own suffering, no-one else. When one experiences this truth, the madness of finding fault with others goes away. (10 years ago I said precisely this in almost these words to my daughter, when she was having a particular problem. This, at least, was something I was able to evolve on my own, but only lately has my ability to actually take the advice been even slightly effective.)

Let me amplify. Something happens that causes you to feel bad (and remember, the entire goal of The Buddha was to teach happiness). There are two reasons you might feel bad: (1) Something bad has actually occurred: you were hit by a truck and are in pain, or whatever, or (2) Your previous experiences cause you to react in a way that causes the bad feelings.

Almost always it is case (2). The extent to which events aren’t actually bad, of course, increases as you lose your cravings and aversions, which don’t lead to happiness anyway (e.g. money can’t buy happiness, just pleasure). When it is case (2), the bad feelings are extraneous—you’d be better off without them. Of course, if you have them, repressing them is even worse. The best case is, you notice the bad feeling arising, realize that both the feeling and the thing causing it are impermanent, not harming you at the moment, and you are unbothered. In this way you replace reaction with planning. The reaction wasn’t doing you any good in the first place.

You might think that this leads to a lessening of spontaneity, but the reports are that the opposite becomes true. You, not your irrational learned structure, respond.

This has endless application. An example for me, that has often increased my happiness in the past maybe six months, has been my reaction to inconsiderate noise. This noise occurs when people talk in movies (thus harming my ability to be “in” the movie, and lowering my enjoyment), when a neighbor or someone outside plays music too loud, when a go-fast boat goes by our apartment, and so on.

I would like the noise not to be there. But I know, for example, that if it were my visiting grandchildren—if I had grandchildren—having fun in the next room, I’d think the same noise was just fine. Maybe I’d go in and ask nicely if they’d turn it down. I certainly wouldn’t get angry, I’d be glad to have visiting grandchildren. What used to get me angry was that the people involved were inconsiderate. What’s that got to do with me and my happiness? I’m sorry there are inconsiderate people in the world, but it’s not very high on my list of the world’s problems that I’m sorry about (compared to, say, war and hunger). So I plan. Is this actually disturbing me/keeping me awake/stopping me from reading etc.? If so, is there something I can do about it? Once the anger doesn’t actually arise, it’s far easier to both gauge the disruption, and figure out what to do if anything.

The change for me is that I have all this thinking in the front of my mind now, and I have the ability to observe my anger about noise. I have trained myself to do so (remember Goenka’s private secretaries above?). In theory, an experienced meditator sees the anger—or other “impurities”—arise via awareness of sensations, but I have learned special cases. My own meager ability as a meditator lets me get to where I examine the moment easily, and I notice that, really, nothing so terrible is happening.

Don’t confuse this for pacifism or inaction! To the contrary, it is the making of more effective action. The alternatives are:

1. Note the thing that is a problem. Figure out what to do about, using your clear-headed reasoning that is at its best when you are genuinely calm, vs.

2. Get angry and then try to do your best.

In option 2, your anger (evident, or suppressed) is simply doing you no good whatsoever. What’s the point of it? It doesn’t make you more effective than you would be with clear-headed thinking.

This small thing has been a big deal for me. I’ve been able to apply it more and more widely (not just about noise), and it has made a big difference. And I am certain there is a lot more learning like this to come. I am finding that this kind of thinking has very broad application, to areas like regrets (not a problem I’ve really had), physical pain, worries, etc. I’m hoping that my continuing meditation experiences will enhance this ability.

Thanks for reading this!

- Josh / May 30, 2007