Meditation – Stories From the Ground.

How to Have a Good Meditation Retreat: In Theory and Practice

“If you practice for a result, then it becomes a hindrance.” – Dipa Ma (common advice to students)

“What is important is not the experiences we have but how we get transformed by them.” – Sayadaw U Jagara (recounted by Joseph Goldstein in Reflections on Nibbana)

Thwarted Desires

In Buddhism, there’s a saying that the path is “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Upon starting a meditation practice, many of us notice surprising benefits. Encouraged by these benefits, we may then seek to take the practice further, setting aside days, weeks, or months to retreat from the world, dedicate ourselves to meditation, and reap the fruits of deep stillness.

Delusion and the Useful Futility of Defining Meditation

“Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative.” – Will Storr, The Unpersuadables

Misled by Nature

It’s easy to feel high and mighty about our place in the animal kingdom. Despite the physical prowess and surprising ingenuity of our animal cousins, we can’t help but regard them with some degree of pity. Sure, it’s impressive that leafcutter ants farm fungi (and have done so for millions of years), that some birds can fly over 10,000km without stopping, and that male emperor penguins incubate eggs for two months in frigid darkness, but isn’t it also a bit … meaningless?

Why Things Don’t Exist (or A Very Western Interpretation of Emptiness)

“It is not clear that the universe is a thing, and if it is defined as a set of things it runs the risk of paradox.” – Paul Davies, God and the New Physics

“The thought of your mother is not your mother.” – Joseph Goldstein (restating words spoken by his teacher, Anagarika Munindra)

Holding Reality In Mind

Until Pythagoras and Parmenides, we believed the Earth was flat. Until Copernicus and Kepler, we believed we were at the centre of the universe. Until Darwin and Wallace, we believed that humans were perfectly crafted divine creations. Throughout human existence, we’ve consistently believed in models of reality that have been proven wrong. How is this possible?

Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & Cons

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“Do not meditate to get the right attitude—get the right attitude, then you’re meditating.” – Tuck Loon, Cambodian meditation teacher

“Meditate to understand, not ‘because of gong’.” – paraphrasing Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Burmese monk

My First Retreat

In 2015 I attended my first meditation retreat, at a small centre on the prairies of eastern Alberta. Going in, I knew what to expect: ten days of total silence, physical pain, and little to eat. In this sense I was more prepared than some of my fellow meditators. Basil, a University of Alberta medical student, was shocked to learn that he’d just signed up for ten dinner-free nights. Hino, an Eritrean immigrant living in Fort McMurray, didn’t know that we would have to give up our phones. Hearing Basil ask others whether they knew about the no-dinner policy, and watching Hino flaccidly protest the removal of his phone privileges, I felt a bit smug. The retreat hadn’t even begun and people were already suffering. Continue reading “Vipassana with SN Goenka: Pros & Cons”

Rethinking Death

dikaseva-34881-unsplash “Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it—you’ve got to go sometime.” — Pink Floyd, The Great Gig in the Sky

Morbid Metaphors

Life is often compared to a burning candle whose luminosity is bookended, past and future, by eternal darkness. At first blush, this metaphor seems apt: consciousness comes into existence, illuminates a lifetime of experience, then dissolves, replaced by the abyss whence it came. But such a comparison is wrongheaded, emblematic of prevailing attitudes towards death which are unimaginative and unduly negative. Continue reading “Rethinking Death”

Why Bother Meditating?

“Most of our world is mind-spin.”—Stephen Levine

“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.”—David Foster Wallace

An Unsatisfying Present

As we pass through life, we are consistently conflicted about the present moment. As children, we want the freedom enjoyed by adults, but upon growing up we come to envy the carefree nature of childhood. Thinking of generations past, we envision a world unblighted by modern technology and capitalistic greed, yet projecting to the future we see glimmers of our salvation in green technology made by conscionable business. Whether romanticizing the past or exalting the future, we often wish to be someplace other than the here and now.

Continue reading “Why Bother Meditating?”

The Importance of Awareness

“And yet I think also that if even we today could acquire the knack of maintaining undistracted consciousness between coffee breaks, we too might find that we possessed angelic talents, powers, and skills.” – Joseph Campbell

“The truth about us is sobering: We have been playing with our smart phones while hurtling toward the abyss…” – Sam Harris

Introduction

The flourishing of humanity depends on many mental and physical attributes, such as dexterous hands, abstract thought, communication ability and kin relations. If any of these characteristics vanished on a widespread scale, our quality of life would almost certainly regress. Although most traits foundational to human achievement are intact, a mental faculty indispensable to human progress is being catastrophically degraded.

Continue reading “The Importance of Awareness”

Who’s in Control?

“The inner man has been created in the image of the outer.” – BF Skinner

“We live our lives, as it were, ‘inside out’, projecting the existence of an ‘I’ as separate from an external world which we try to manipulate to gain satisfaction.” – Namkhai Norbu

Introduction

Until better explanations became available, humans personified nature to explain its workings: gods with human looks and emotions have been invoked across cultures as causes behind natural processes, it was once believed that sperm housed little humans, and the mental faculty of foresight is often attributed to blind evolutionary processes that cannot anticipate future states. Fortunately, the scientific method has usurped much of the personified description of nature. Though we’ve realized personification’s inadequacy at explaining natural processes, the common understanding of our inner mental lives – themselves natural processes – hinges upon personification. We wrongly invoke personae (aka “selves”) as the causes behind human behaviour.[1] This oversimplification neglects the formative role of the environment on actions and mental states. Continue reading “Who’s in Control?”