Cosmopathy #11: Buddha and Vipassana Meditation, Ringworld, Our Intentional Community

My View of the World

Personal Transformation
This would have to be the theme of this issue. Me being the person transforming. Having taken a 10-day course in Vipassana Meditation and the release of our (including my wife and anyone else who signs on) proposal to create Querencia, a self-sufficient intentional community in Costa Rica really pushes me across the academic-talk-sphere boundary into the do-sphere. Read on.

On a similar but smaller note, I completed my first carved spoon by myself since learning how to carve spoons with the Center for Whole Communities. Carving a piece of a wood by hand from a special place helps the carver forge a personal relationship with that place, creating a stronger bond and imbuing the carving with special significance. In this case, the piece of wood came from the Allegheny National Forest, an area where I have been work for the past year and a half as an interpretive planner. See my new carved spoon page.

Also in the transformation department, Marisol and I have announced the formation of our baby, due in late April (see October sonogram to the right).

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Every impassioned worldview change researcher (and there are many of us out there) must indulge an occassional spiritual experience or risk falling into a pit of hypocrisy or at the very least understand worldviews through a very limited lense. Indeed I have read much about spiritual experiences and know people who have described them: out of body experiences, astral travels, encounters with spirits and ghosts, running up and down mountains without water or tire, flashing lights, to death and back, Kundalini awakenings, and on and on. And then there’s me. What have I had? A chatterbox mind that flees my attention every time I sat down to meditate — an explosion of stars in my view when I bang my head — a visit to a church to admire its stained glass. With hope of something more, I signed up for a 10-day Vipassana course on the recommendation of a colleague who had the same experience. At the very least I could improve my meditation.

When a young bird eats a poisonous Monarch Butterfly, it sickens and perhaps vomits up the little charm. The foul test acquired from the butterfly’s diet of milkweed, teaches the bird a quick and distasteful lesson: never again eat such a butterfly. The bird develops an aversion and a Monarch-less life goes on. When Ivan Pavlov trained his dog to salivate at the sound of a metronome, the dog developed a craving toward the sound. In fact, all the animal kingdom shares this kind of learning. Humans are no exception. I can think of any number of my own cravings: hoard food, pursue prestige, my photo albums. I also have aversions: deep water, world disaster, unhealthy body, etc.

But this age-old adaptation can take humans to life-long misery: fears, phobias, depression, anxiety, jealousy, anger, hatred, pride, sadness, and any number of other maladies that all originate from attachment to objects (either through craving or aversion).

Twenty-five hundred years ago a man named Siddhartha Gautama experimented with many kinds of meditation and techniques to liberate himself of his impurities of mind (all the negativity described above). After six years, he finally discovered a path that led him to not only a complete liberation of this mental suffering, but realized Nirvana, became enlightened, and for the next 45 years the Buddha taught others to liberate themselves. One of his great contributions was Vipassana Meditation.

Now Goenka (among other teachers) (see biography below) has brought Vipassana to the West. I took his 10-day course in Blue Ridge, VA along with 20 other students. We practiced Noble Silence, talking to no one other than teacher and volunteer staff. We could not read, write, play, or do anything outside of meditate, eat, sleep, walk, and think. Women and men remained separated. All lectures and instructions Goenka had audio- and videotaped 14 years earlier. But his omnipresence was powerful, present, and eloquent.

Essentially the Buddha discovered that all suffering comes when external objects trigger pleasant and unpleasant sensations on the body. Chocolate, sex, success, power all trigger pleasant sensations. Fire, failure, snakes, bad movies all produce unpleasant sensations. The millions-of-years-old mental habitat of the subconscious mind is to transform these sensations into cravings and aversions which then later serve up a daily plate of suffering unto and including death. Pain in life is mandatory, suffering is optional, said the Buddha.

He found a way to break this habit. Through a keen self-awareness of the body’s sensations and an equinimity that prevents the mind from reacting to sensations, the link between sensations and creation of aversions and cravings can be broken, but only with meditation training and lots of practice. The Buddha defined the Middle Path with three stages. First the person must follow 8 precents of morality, whose defiance results in deep mental complexes, more cravings, more aversions, more suffering. After morality, the person develops mind mastery in attention and self-awareness. With awareness and self-observation of sensations, the person experiences a truth and acquires wisdom. Since the entire approach is based on the universal phenomenon of impermanence — things arise and pass away always so no need to crave or fear ephemeral sensations and phenomena — without feeding the old cravings and aversions with new material, those cravings and aversions eventually rise to the surface and peel away. They weaken under the light of objective observation by the person. Eventually when they all disappear, the person has been liberated from impurities and experiences continuous happiness, joy, love, and compassion for all beings.

So what did I learn? At first within two days I quieted the beast of my agitated and wild mind. I learned to focus without my mind scurrying down every dark path along the way. I learned to feel subtle sensations in the body I never knew existed and on the eve of the final day I had my first unusual, perhaps even proto-spiritual feeling.

Above I mentioned that cravings and aversions rose to the surface and peeled off. This happens mostly during meditation when the mind is self-aware and observing the sensations on the body. But cravings and aversions do not appear with big labels such as “cravings for sugar” or “aversions for spiders.” They rise as localized itches and hotspots. They arise as blank spots on the body where the person suddenly cannot feel the subtle sensations. The subconscious sends them up as agitation in the mind, heat, visions, and any variety of symptoms. Because Vipassana is a natural process and does not force things to the surface as can psychotherapy, fasting, and even exorcisms, the manifestations are usually manageable, but still can be strange, especially to the acolyte meditator like me.

The day before I had felt and heard my heart beat. It beat very loudly and my pulse overpowered all other sensations. But I checked my pulse and it was still under 70. Loud but slow. I thought my mind was playing a trick on me. The next day the loud beating began again. This time, however, in my right ear the air pressure suddenly increased making it hard to hear sounds on that side of my head. In my left ear, the pressure was low and a loud rushing of air roared away from my head, outward. At the same time the beating pulse echoed throughout my head and my right arm went blank to my self-awareness. I felt scared but maintained enough calmness to observe these phenomena and tell myself that I should neither fear them or crave them (that is, often students crave that such experiences return). Later, I discovered that these kinds of symptoms are not unusual in this process and are part of the purification process.

But I had never felt anything like them, especially in tandem. I coupled this personal experience with stories of another student who has had much deeper and more violent effects — convulsions, demonic visions, high anxiety, bursting heat and pain — because he had forced himself unnaturally into deep trances which brought up deep-seated mental complexes that exploded from his body. Because I saw him during this process and my own experience, my skepticism toward the nature of this process has dwindled. Now I meditate twice daily and try to live a more equanimous life, endowing my worldview change studies with a dab of spiritual experience.

Because the Buddha had a scientific, skeptical mind himself, eschewed sectarianism, blind devotion, and promoted reason and wisdom among his disciples, I pulled What the Buddha Taught off my shelf of retired college books and learned much of the philosophical context of Dhamma (natural law or teaching), Magga (the Path), the five aggregates, the Eight-fold Path, and the Four Noble Truths, among others. While much of his work is practical and firmly embedded in modern civilization’s worldview (in fact, his concept of impermanence has received modern fortification through Quantum Mechanics), his views on reincarnation, Conditional Genesis, and the nature of life (that is there is no Self), are all insights into different deep assumptions about the world.

Nonetheless, although Buddhism is arguably not a religion, it does share in common with the other major religions the aspect of being salvationist. As Daniel Quinn pointed out in Ishmael, all the salvationist religions evolved roughly at the same time to give hope to the laity in suffering — poverty, oppression, disease — that there is a way out. The difference that Buddha offered, however, is that any person who works hard on the Path, can escape suffering in this lifetime. No gods. No heaven or hell. Just hard work and in this life or the next, liberation and perhaps enlightenment would come.

Certainly I can write these newsletters until the good fuse burns out, and never accomplish anything. Thus, the spirituality, systems thinking, and sustainability have come together in a cosmic alignment to produce this concept that Marisol and I will pursue in Costa Rica. We have decided to facilitate the building of a visionary community, an example for Latin America, of a self-sufficient community. Yes, years will it take to happen, but this will become the great life project.

Querencia, a word brought to English from Spanish by environmental writer, Barry Lopez, to mean “a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn — a place in which we know exactly who we are — the place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.”

In the vein of the Center for Whole Communities, we are recruiting other interested people and organizations to create a community that integrates us with the land and with each other, to regrow the many links that bind us and have been severed by modern civilization. We invite all of you to review this proposal, feedback to me, and if the vision feels like something you have been considering for a long time, maybe you would consider becoming an endorser. The proposal is in Spanish and English and you will be hearing more about Querencia in this newsblog.

Mr. Goenka is a teacher of Vipassana meditation in the tradition of the late Sayagyi U Ba Khin of Burma (Myanmar).

Although Indian by descent, Mr. Goenka was born and raised in Burma. While living in Burma he had the good fortune to come into contact with U Ba Khin, and to learn the Vipassana Technique from him. After receiving training from his teacher for fourteen years, Mr. Goenka settled in India and began teaching Vipassana in 1969. In a country still sharply divided by differences of caste and religion, the courses offered by Mr. Goenka have attracted thousands of people from every part of society. In addition, many people from countries around the world have come to join courses in Vipassana meditation. For more....

What I’m Reading: Ringworld

Larry Niven’s 1970 science fiction classic won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, the hightest merits in SF writing. I read it in my continued quest to read a variety of authors to prepare my own fiction. While the story was not a literary masterpiece, the author mastered the creation of setting, of his own world. With precise and high quality science, Niven created an engineered world, a ring world that encircles a sun and a multi-species exploration of it. With the mass of Jupiter, Ringworld slowly spins around this sun, with its own artificial atmosphere, day-night cycles, gravity, and implanted life forms. Artificial worlds are great places to experiment with the dynamics of worldviews.

Next issue: Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail to Succeed