As It Is

For most of us, grace does not always spontaneously reveal itself and we need to pick ourselves up from our own Buddhastraps. One way to do this is to immerse yourself in S.N. Goenka's 10-day Vipassana course which I've heard about for years but was always hesitant to take on. I somehow thought it was too simple in its dharma and approach. What I found out is there is an elegance to its simplicity.

There is the technique of scanning the body for sensations, distilled from the Buddha's original Pāli Canon which was preserved as a practice in Myanmar (Burma). With awareness of gross, subtle and very subtle sensations, the saṅkhāras (formations/impurities) can begin to be cleared away. Otherwise, the mind just becomes a stick in the mud craving this or averting that. And I definitely experienced the mud! As the sediment of the mind is churned up through the depths of the practice, those waters can become very murky for a while. As they say, it gets worse before it gets better. 

While there were moments of utter agony where my ego was shouting at me, there were also many moments of ecstatic bliss that lured me down the wrong way. In either case, I was always applying effort to come back to what is experiencing all this experience. Eventually this allows for a posture of equanimity which sees experiences with non-attachment; not an aloof detachment, but more like an “holy indifference” that is intimately sober. Goenka kept going back to the core of the teaching: to see reality as it is, and not the way we want it to be. 

That bears repeating: to see reality as it is. If we could take that teaching all the way in and out, the timbers to man would not be so crooked. We would not continuously wannbe, but just be. Even chasing enlightenment is a wannabe'ing away from being. The problem is always not seeing the mirage as a mirage.

There was the bottom-up approach to the technique, but in the end it culminated for me with top-down love. What made the difference with the practice is I ultimately fell in love with Goenka which came in a tearful, joyful moment.

While possessing a magnetic presence, Goenka also had a grandfatherly decency and pragmatism about him that sweetly resonated with me. God finds all sorts of interesting conduits. In the 1991 discourses, Goenka talks about the dangers of idolatry. If devotion arises, it should be devotion for the good qualities of character you see in another. While that may an astute point, it's never feasible to detach qualities from the overall goodness and beauty of the man. It's in the integration of personhood where it all comes alive! And for me, he did breathe life into the structure of the retreat.

Siddhārtha Gautama said there were four types of people: those who come from the darkness and move toward more darkness, those who come from lightness and move toward darkness, those who come from lightness and move towards more lightness, and those who come from darkness but move their way to lightness. I am probably in the latter category based on the low bar of wisdom I came in to this world with. But I always had a sense there was more. And these retreats are the times when that more is confirmed as a direct encounter — an encounter with the mystery and reality as it is. 

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”

― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man