Ideas on Meditation, Part 4 - Vipassanna

In Easter of 2016 I spent 10 days on a silent meditation retreat. That description alone, I’ve found, is enough to perplex most people.  You can see it in their eyes – ok, that is nuts.  But if you’re reading this blog about meditation, you must be interested in it (or a really good friend).

So let’s skip past the ‘crazy cult thing’ and move on to where I went, what happened, and what I thought of the experience.

Where did I go? I went to a Vipassanna center, which teaches a meditation technique that has a direct lineage to the Buddha’s teachings some 2500 years ago.  However, the teaching itself is not ‘Buddhist’ - it’s faith-neutral, and really a contemplative exercise in experiencing our lives in a deeper way.

Before my arrival, I was amazed that the entire set up - the accommodation, the glorious food, and the instruction itself, are all free.  It costs nothing.  The organization survives on donations from graduates, and it asks those graduates to only donate in line with the value of their experience, and their ability to make that donation.  Seriously.  There wasn’t a guilt-trip fund-raising sales talk to endure at the end.  Just a simple explanation of what they would use the money for, if you decided you wanted to donate and could afford to do so.  From a voluntary, donation-based finance structure, the organization has grown to 170 centres worldwide in the last 40 years (since its revival, which is too complicated a story for this blog). 

I knew it had to be good.

So what happens? First, a vow of silence with no books, no music, no writing paper, no drawing, no snacks, no musical instruments, and no exercise.  Just meditation, eating and sleeping, for the entire 10 days.

The schedule itself is even more intense:

4:00am		Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30am		Private Meditation
6:30-8am		Breakfast
8-9am		Group meditation
9-11am		Private Meditation
11-12		Lunch break
12-1pm		Rest and Private Questions for the Teacher
1-2:30pm		Private Meditation
2:30-3:30pm		Group meditation
3:30-5pm		Private Meditation
5-6pm		Dinner break
6-7pm		Group meditation
7-8pm		Teacher's Lecture in the hall
8-9pm		Group meditation
9-9:30pm		Group Question Time for the Teacher
9:30 pm		Retire to your own room--Lights out

The first evening starts with some basic instruction for the next day’s 12 hours of meditation, and off you go.  Some people had no previous meditation experience, but I’m glad I wasn’t one of them. 

There are a load of great blogs which go into more detail about the retreat, and how it all works, so if you’re interested, you might want to read this one, this one or this one.

What did I think of it?  It was challenging.  And one heck of an experience.  As my previous blogs have expressed, the purpose of meditation is not ‘stopping thinking’, but learning to harness our other senses.  Our sense of touch, taste, hearing and smell are so much finer than we realize – our bodies give us fascinating information all the time, but we’re normally too absorbed in thought to hear any of it.

Spending 10 days in meditation gave me an opportunity to really listen. 

One of the paradoxical things about meditation is that words can’t describe the experience. A faithful blog is impossible, and the purpose of this blog is to share my theory on this.

Right now, as you read this, we accept that you’re experiencing four dimensions: the three dimensions of space, plus time.  My crazy idea is that you’re actually experiencing more.  You have the space-time field you’re inside of (4 dimensions), alongside the layers of experience of those four dimensions - what you’re thinking, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting and seeing.  

Could how you feel be a dimension of reality?

Hear me out.  We all experience a single reality. But the experience of this ‘single reality’ is different for everyone, and to each person their experience is real. Nowhere in the four dimensions is there happiness, sadness, hope or anxiety, or any storyline of thoughts about why those feelings exist.  In my mad little theory, we’re experiencing 6 dimensions, all the time - the normal four plus dimensions of thinking and feeling.

If you don't like the word 'dimension' for this, no problem.  Call it something else.  But I'm sure we agree that how we think and feel about reality makes our world immensely more rich and texturous and occasionally overwhelming.  We experience all these signals from the external world, plus our thoughts and feelings about the external world.  

Meditation is all about deepening our awareness of this experience.  The reason a blog cannot describe accurately is mathematical. 

A blog is linear.  As with all language, each word has to exist in a defined, grammatical sequence, one after the other.  The use of language is probably best described as two dimensions.  We have the word itself, one at a time, and what that word means to us.  But during this sentence, the blog cannot also create other layers of experience, the way reality can.  

Therefore, a blog cannot accurately describe a journey of all six dimensions, especially one like meditation.

Another great example of this is tickling and giggling.  I could blog about it until the end of time, but you’ll never understand tickling or giggling from a blog.

So what I got out of Vipassanna was a tickling introduction into what meditation is there to help us explore.  And tickling is a nice parallel, because being tickled is not completely fun, even though we giggle.  There’s something both wonderful and awful about it, at the same time.  We laugh and recoil.  Meditation is a little like that, full of duality.  Once you get good instruction and develop a diligent practice (unlike tickling, it’s not instantaneous – you have to work at it) one can really experience our universe in a wider, broader and yet somehow more precise way.  We can begin to see how things really are, right now.

There is a depth and breadth to life that is beyond our mind's ability to comprehend whilst merely thinking on its own.  There is a richer experience to be had when we use our entire experience, all six dimensions, to embrace the whole thing.  Some of it is disturbing.  Some of it is exhilarating.  A fascinating part is how differently even the notion of being 'disturbed' or 'exhilarated' becomes when one just starts to feel completely aware, starts to feel awakened.

This is what I got from the Vipassanna retreat.