Post #163: The Vipassana Trench

11 Dec. 2024

     If you have not concerned yourself much with meditation, you would probably expect it to have something to do with relaxation. After all, so far as the eye can see, there is nothing remotely stressful going on when someone seems to be chilling on the mat; and then we all have in our heads the Buddha with a thousand faces who exudes tranquility from every pore as he sits with his legs crossed in this or that configuration of the great archetype of the peaceful meditator…

     Upon a little reflection, it might occur to the more wary that sitting cross-legged with a straight back for more than a few minutes at a time might create considerable strain among those not used to it. Hence the ubiquitous struggles with knee troubles and back pains on the meditation circuit, in Western circles especially. To this must be added the obvious challenges of boredom, or of aggravated fidgetiness when asked to sit still for painfully prolonged periods.

     Anyone who has ever dabbled with focusing on a meditation object with eyes closed, or attempting to do so, will also know about the wild swirl—nay the maddening welter—of errant thoughts chasing each other across the stormy mental plains where one might have naïvely hoped to encounter nothing but calm breezes and balmy sunshine. Hardly.

     So far, nothing too unexpected; but something else may come as more of a surprise, namely a characteristic experience with Vipassana meditation that may sound, at first, highly counter-intuitive. Imagine a relatively seasoned meditator for whom doubt in what he is doing on the mat has gone away; imagine too that the flood of distracting thoughts, which can make themselves felt so disturbingly at first, really does subside as the mind settles down, and that there are no easily attributable pains of the back-and-knees variety. Well, then it must be smooth sailing across the halcyon seas of the mind, or better yet, soaring off into the blue skies without a cloud in sight, right?

     Possible, but not to be counted on. Picture, instead, that when the initial blur and restlessness of the mind clears up and a reasonable level of focus and concentration has established itself, the body fills every minute a little more not with the kind of light and pleasant sensations that make meditation fun and obviously enjoyable, but with highly unpleasant, perhaps nearly unbearable sensations instead! For no discernible reason—horror of horrors—there is nothing but extreme discomfort to be found throughout the body, making you want to do nothing so much as to open your eyes and be done with the misery. Surely this must be some kind of hideous miscarriage in your practice, some bizarre accident? But alas, no: this is not an aberration, but simply the nature of the deeper kind of diving. Welcome to the Vipassana Trench!

     Just what is going on here? How can something feel so physically awful when there is nothing discernibly wrong at all—certainly no bodily emergency that could justify so alarming a display? Let there be no illusions on the point: these sensations can get very nasty indeed, even after years of practice, or perhaps then especially—so much so that all you may want to do, sometimes, is to run away screaming and not come back. This is not what I bargained for! Or is it?

     These seemingly strange goings-on are the great secret of Vipassana. Descriptions in words will not do the phenomenon much justice; it needs to be experienced to become fully plausible. To put it as simply as possible, what you are seeing is your own deeply-rooted reactive patterns, your own mind reflected back at you in a bodily mirror, as it were. Which raises the interesting question why you (or anyone) would want to put yourself through something so wretched. Is this some kind of spiritual masochism manifesting itself, a subliminal wish to be punished for one’s unworthiness, or some such kink in the human mind?

     Not really. The point in staying the course, keeping your butt on the mat, your eyes closed, and your mind fixed on these unedifying displays is that they are, beneath their forbidding appearance, more useful than they feel. By holding out and observing these strange psychosomatic special effects with as much detachment as possible—or with equanimity, to be more precise, that is to say, with an abiding awareness of their transient and impersonal nature—you can weaken the underlying reactive patterns and give yourself, with practice, a deep mental peace such as would otherwise be unattainable.

     Just how these reactive patterns got established in the first place is theoretically interesting but of no great practical importance. Sometimes you will get flashes of memory that suggest an event to which they may be connected, but more usually you will have no idea what experience is behind them. The origins of these disquieting grooves on the mind are for the most part so deep and possibly primordial that they are lost to time. The key to the practice, at any rate, is that you do not need to know where they came from: all you need to do is to keep watching them dispassionately, because doing so will drain them of the charge that they need to persist. Thus, one minute layer after another, you can pull the impurities off the great onion that is your mind, or to use another image, you can pull up the countless weeds that have infested your mental garden and that are choking off the finer plants. Not that you should resent the former (weeds) and crave the latter (manifestations of finer sentiments): that would defeat the purpose of the exercise, which is to observe with equanimity, not to sit in judgment. We do enough of that off the mat.

     Eventually even the most offputting weeds and creepers can become friendly acquaintances of sorts. True, you will never want to invite them for tea deliberately; but when they show up, on their own schedule, not your bidding, you might as well sit down with them, because they are leaving when they want, not when you would like them to. Our ordinary instincts for dealing with such unbid guests (in the form of inward sensations in this case) is just the contrary of course: not to make ourselves comfortable in such uncomfortable company, but to get as far away as possible, or to chase the visitors away with all means at our disposal, at the very least interposing some wall or other between them and us. Much human culture, practically all intoxication, and most of our other entertainments too, are rooted in this deep human desire to make ourselves at home with pleasant sensations only, and get rid of the unpleasant ones if we can. At the crudest level, we are quite aware of this mechanism; what we don’t usually realize is just how deeply it runs, not just at the surface of our minds, but with a whole inward universe of subtle gradations that we are not usually aware of, but that we can bring into awareness with practice.

     Instead of shrinking before or retreating from our sensations, Vipassana (“to see things as they are”) would have us go deeper into them, though with the important proviso that they must be observed with as much equanimity as possible (not frustration or resentment!) or the underlying reactive patterns may end up getting strengthened not weakened in the process. It may sound simple, but how difficult it can be in practice may perhaps be gauged by imagining how it would be to spend 3600 successive seconds fighting off the most urgent desire to quit and get up! In practice, fortunately, it is not usually necessary to battle through an entire hour in quite this harrowing manner; easier moments will be interspersed with more difficult ones. Still it can be ridiculously difficult, even years into the practice. (Two particularly grueling one-hour sessions in recent days inspired this text.)

     Needless to say, Vipassana is not about ignoring the warning signals that our bodies send us in the form of sharp and persistent pains. What we are talking about here is not scenarios where your health or your survival is at issue, but perfectly safe situations in which there is nothing going on that could give you cause for justified alarm. There is plainly no physical emergency that requires attending to, but tell that to sensations hollering at you with all the fury of an incensed fire siren, for no apparent reason! If you got up, they would quickly disperse and disappear from the screen of your mind.

     So why not get up? Why do just the opposite, what you are least ready to do, namely to observe them with calm, dispassionate detachment? The answer is that if you can manage (a very tall order at times!), the reward will be equal to the challenge: rarely does the power of the practice become as intuitively evident as after one has stood one’s ground in this way. Pride in one’s meditative fortitude, such as it may be, has little to do with it; the gratification, or better the relief, comes from how much better the mind handles more ordinarily unpleasant sensations when you get up from the mat after the hour’s battle has been won. Those who are able keep up this practice steadily can accomplish veritable miracles with it, inwardly at least. (What outward miracles buddhas and other such beings may or may not be able to perform gets discussed at the margins of the tradition, but it is incidental to the practice.)

     But hold on, what about the other side of the equation? Where there are trenches, must there not also be peaks? Certainly there are: a deepening practice will not only bring unexpectedly unpleasant sensations, but extremely pleasant ones as well. The logic remains the same: sensations are sensations, and to practice Vipassana is to respond to them as little as possible. And therein lies a great challenge, a danger even. Agonizing sensations are hard enough not to react to with aversion; but delightful, or even blissful ones are that much harder still to observe without craving! And the craving multiplies impurities no less than the aversion does.

     Rapturous episodes do occur on the Path, then, but they are not the point of the practice, and they must be treated with great caution, because they can easily draw all the attention and vitiate any further development. The measure of progress on the Path is equanimity only, and the loving-kindness to which it gives rise, never this or that property of the sensations one encounters along the way. Not that blissful moments should be feared, of course, or deliberately chased away; they are what they are, and so long as they are viewed with detachment (which will rarely be perfect, obviously), they can do no harm. Get too involved in them, however, and they can become your focal point only too easily, often without you even being fully aware of what you are doing, namely chasing after them unconsciously, and getting disappointed with your practice when they go away, as they invariably must sooner or later. To practice thus, “playing the game of sensations,” as S.N. Goenka liked to say, would be the opposite of Vipassana.

     More advanced lessons about the difficulties of handling ecstatic experiences with the requisite equanimity and detachment I must leave to others who are better versed in that side of the practice. Such delights have formed no very prominent part of my meditative experience, which has played itself out, for the most part, on the dentist’s-chair side of things, minus the novocaine.* And that is not a complaint. Nobody says to give yourself toothaches deliberately, or to imagine that your agonies are meant to be enjoyed. Do go to the dentist, please, when your teeth hurt! But not all of life’s afflictions can be treated in this manner, and you will be grateful for your practice when you have to face something that does not respond to pills or surgery.

*Readers may suspect me of harboring an obsession with dentistry, possibly owing to traumatic experiences under the drill, but that is not so. I’ve had my share of appointments and unpleasant times there, but nothing that would leave me with any special sense of dread. On the contrary, I love a good doctor, for my teeth as much as for anything else. I use the image not because I find it so awful, but because it captures so well how one might feel grateful for something that is not pleasurable at all. Bismarck too, incidentally, thought of the dentist’s chair as an apt metaphor for life. As he wrote in a letter to his brother (2 July 1855), “Life reminds me of how a skillful dentist will extract a tooth: one always expects the main thing to lie still ahead, until one realizes with astonishment that it has already passed.” [Das Leben ist wie ein geschicktes Zahnausziehen; man denkt, das Eigentliche soll erst kommen, bis man mit Verwunderung sieht, daß es schon vorbei ist.] Note how in the mid-19th century, even for a Prussian aristocrat, it was still the Dark Ages dentistry-wise: teeth did not get fixed, they got pulled. Note also how, for Bismarck when he was musing thus, the main thing was still very much to come.