3 Miracles of Vipassana & my attempt at rational explanation
So I did the Vipassana 10-day meditation course offered by Dhamma organisation. It was intense. You wake up at 4 AM every day & meditate for over 10 hours, not to mention the 1.5 hours of pravachan (lecture) from videos of Shri S.N. Goenka in the evening.
You are supposed to not speak to any of your fellow meditators (You can still talk to assistant teachers and the volunteers to get clarification on the practice and facilities but you are advised to keep this to a minimum also). The reason for this is to allow you to be able to concentrate effectively during the meditation sessions. Conversations will inevitably lead to throughts which distract you during meditation. Another reason for encouraging silence is that we are supposed to observe no lying. And when you talk, intentionally or not, it’s very difficult to not lie. You are prone to speak in half-truths and use a lot of white lies (eg : “How are you today?” “Fine”). My friends were doubtful that staying silent for 10 days is feasible. But honestly, silence was the easiest part.
The real toll this takes is a) Mental & b) Physical.
Meditating is tough mental work. Each meditation session feels like a new day, and each day feels like a week. At the end of the day, especially the first 4 days when you are practising Samadhi (ability to focus), my brain would feel quite drained. A kind of soreness, not unlike the one you experience in your muscles the day after weight-lifting. It got better post day-4. That’s when we moved from Samadhi meditation to Vipassana meditation, and I felt my mind becoming way more relaxed.
The physical toll on the body is the worst. Sitting cross-legged for so long kills your back and knees. I noticed with a bit of humour & pride that Indians fared much better with the cross-legged posture, it was torture for the westerners. Fortunately, they provided some cushions you could use for support, and you could also ask for more rigid back support. The first couple of days are the worst, when you don’t know what to expect and how your body is reacting is all new. Then you get familiar with the sensations, it becomes a regular part of meditation & life.
Now that we have covered the tough parts, what exactly makes the experience rewarding? Why should anyone do it?
Note that what I describe are my own experiences. Since this is internally experienced, someone else attending it may describe the experience in a different way. As is the way with internal experiences, there is no way exact way (yet) to say whether what two people are experiencing is the same or not. And even thinking about your experience can taint it & you can start hallucinating about what you felt. So the rational person in me recommends you take this all with a bit of salt. All I can say is, the descriptions Shri S. N. Goenka ji was giving of the experiences felt uniquely apt to me, it felt like he was describing very close to what I was experiencing, and that was mind-blowing.
Miracle 1 - Experiencing experience, a cessation of thoughts
After practicing Samadhi for first 3 days, I felt I could be in a state with no thoughts. It would only last a few moments, maybe a few seconds before the thoughts would steal my attention again. But during those precious moments, I would experience the world as is. I was just experience. No thoughts about the future, about the past, about myself or anything else.
Being blessed with an over-active internal monologue, I had wanted to experience this state for some time. I had wondered what it would be like. Would it be extreme bliss? Would I cry? Would it feel like achieving some higher level of consciousness? I had really wanted to find out.
In reality, it felt like nothing of the sort. It felt like nothing at all. It was just a transient state, you are fully immersed in what you are experiencing in that moment, whether it is looking at a flower, hearing the sounds of footsteps, feeling the ache in your muscles. You are experiencing these in full without even the emotional response. No judgement or feeling of goodness or badness. The world as is. And as soon as you try to rationalize about the experience, which I am prone to do out of habit, the state is gone. For a thought has entered. So one can either be in this state or reason about the state. Not both.
What causes this state? Here’s my attempt at a rational explanation.
The past few days we all had spend hours focusing our mind on finer & finer phenomenon. Starting from the breath, to the fleeting sensation of the breath touching the area above your upper lip. This has led to the brain being sharpened to focus strongly on a specific detail, among all the pandemonium. So after the meditation session, when one open their eyes, there is an huge inflow of stimuli while the brian is still in it’s highly focused state. In this state, the brain can only focus on a specific experience, or jump between experiences one by one, leaving the thought center unattended.
Miracle 2 - Body as a field of sensations
On the 8th day, I could feel my entire body as a field of sensations. It felt as if you have ants walking all over the body. Or to use a less horrific description, like there are small currents on your skin all over your body. Then it resolves to a feeling of an inner eye, one which can see within the body, more specifically the outer layer of skin. You can turn it any body part similar to how you would turn your eye to look at different things. And instead of light, it gives a sense of touch, temperature, pressure, pain.
How does it work? Here’s my attempt at a rational explanation.
The meditations over the past few days was focused on scanning our entire body part-by-part. Starting from the top of your head, we’d move our attention down step-by-step to the toes, and then reversing this back to the head, over and over. Over and over. As a result of this procedure, combined with the practice of Samadhi earlier (focusing on breath), the mind has likely become very sensitive to small changes in bodily sensations. Similar to how a musician would be hyper-aware of the different chords being played or a perfumer is be hyper-aware of the compositions of a scent.
Miracle 3 — Memory-Body connection
As you are scanning the body, you will encounter body parts devoid of any feeling or where you can only feel it at as a one whole object, cannot feel finer parts within it. Shri S. N. Goenka addresses this phenomenon, and says that these are because there are ‘knots’ within yourself, feelings or memories you are suppressing. The advice here is to try & focus on these parts for a minute, and then move on. Keep doing this and over time, the knots will loosen & sensation will come back to these parts.
Now, this is the freaky part. And I would not have believed it if I did not experience it. For several meditation sessions, I had realised I could not feel my neck & shoulders at the same resolution as I could feel my arms or legs or back. So I was following the instructions of paying attention on these parts for a moment and moving on. As one meditates, one is prone to get distracted. But then, in one of the sessions I was thrown back into some vivid memories, old memories which I have not remembered for years. Difficult memories with strong shame & regret associated. Before this, I had not even realised I felt so strongly about those moments. It hit like a ton of bricks. And then, upon having experienced those memories again, as if magically, sensations returned in my neck & shoulders. There was a feeling of lightness, and I think even my sitting posture improved.
Here’s my attempt at a rational explanation.
Like every stimuli, each of our memories has a feeling associated with it. Since we evolved from animals, I theorise that the prototype of each ‘feeling’ is based on bodily sensations. Our brain can sense a lot of feelings but the origination of every feeling is within the body somewhere. Hence, our memories are associated with a feeling which in turn is derived from bodily sensation. So when there is a suppressed emotion/memory, it leads to loss of sensations felt from the associated body part as well. As we try to access the sensations in that body part, we also trigger the associated emotion & the associated memory.
I am not sure if this explanation stands up to scientific theory, it is just my hypothesis. It does explain more about the Vipassana practice though. The overall aim of Vipassana is to tame the unconscious mind so that one does not get consumed in the torrent of emotions and mental anguish. The approach taken is to observe the body & bodily sensations. If it is true that all thoughts arise from a preceding emotion generated by the unconscious mind, and all emotions begin with a sensation on the body, then it makes total sense to observe the body to regulate your emotions & tame the unsconscious. Observing the body is essentially a ‘hack’ to observe the unconscious mind.
Would I recommend the course? I definitely found it to be very rewarding and am committed to continuing the practice as long as I can. But I will acknowledge it is not for everyone. The 10 days are tough as described above. If you think you can make it, give it a shot. The volunteers make every effort to make sure you are comfortable.
Apart from the meditation itself, there’s a thing to be said about the people you meet in the course. (In case you are wondering, you get to talk to them only on the 0th day after registration is done & before the course has started, and then on the 10th day after the silence is broken) The course brings together a very interesting set of people, a slice of the human tapestry you would not find anywhere else. It won’t be far out to say that I was probably the most boring person with the most traditional life experiences.
The course is highly structured and a lot of care is taken to ensure every participant across the centers has the same experience, wherever they are taking it. If I were to give any advice, I would only say that do the course where you are comfortable with the weather. Where it is neither too hot nor too cold. Else it may interfere with your meditation. I did it in Kathmandu, Nepal in January where it extremely cold during the early morning meditation sessions. I still found the experience extremely rewarding & the cold added to the sense of adventure. But if I were to do it again, which I hope to in a few years, I will definitely choose a warmer place.
