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Oct. 28, 2014 - Making Sense - Sam Harris
50:29
#4 — The Path and the Goal

Sam Harris speaks with Joseph Goldstein about the practice of meditation. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
This is Sam Harris.
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Well, I'm here with Joseph Goldstein, who's a very old friend and quite respected meditation teacher.
And we're going to talk about all things related to meditation.
Meditation and Mindfulness.
Joseph and I have known each other for about 25 years and he was one of my first meditation teachers and became a friend a long time ago.
We spent a lot of time studying with other teachers in Asia.
He's here recording this interview with me under less than ideal audio conditions, so we apologize for that.
Joseph, for those of you who don't know, started the Insight Meditation Society in Western Massachusetts.
And has probably done more than anyone, certainly as much as anyone, to establish the practice of mindfulness in the West.
And this explosion of interest you see in mindfulness in the scientific community and in clinical practice is largely the result of how clearly he and his colleagues have taught it to thousands of Westerners.
So Joseph and I are going to talk about mindfulness and the mind in general and probably push into some areas of interest only to us and alienate 99% of our listeners, but that's what we are free to do.
So Joseph, thank you for being here and thank you for agreeing to talk about all this with me.
I'm delighted to have a chance to get back into the meat of our discussions, which we've had over all these years.
Joseph and I have had arguments on transcontinental flights where he has been captive and desperate to avoid me, however unsuccessfully.
So, before we get into esoterica, tell us a little bit about how you got into meditation and how this became your life's work.
Well, I was studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York as an undergraduate, and by the time my senior year came around, I was really anxious just to get out and see the world.
This was in 1965 and it was just soon after the Peace Corps was established.
So that seemed to me a really good vehicle for getting out and Seeing new parts of the world.
So I applied to the Peace Corps, and I actually applied to go to East Africa, but as fate, or karma, or accident, or whatever, whatever the conditions may be, happened, they sent me to Thailand, which turned out to be a very fortunate happening.
Because while I was in Thailand, I had my first contact really with Buddhism and Buddhist teachings and meditation.
Soon after I started teaching in Bangkok, I was teaching English, I started going to a discussion group at the Marble Temple, which is quite a famous temple in Bangkok.
There were some Western monks who were leading the discussion, kind of introducing Westerners to some of the Buddhist ideas and concepts.
Of course, having just graduated college in philosophy, I went there full of my own ideas about things and I would be asking so many questions in the group that people would stop coming.
I think we've all been in groups like that.
Right.
And we've probably both been that person.
You were the insufferable blowhard.
Exactly.
So finally this one monk says, Joseph, I think you ought to meditate.
I didn't know anything about it.
I didn't know anybody who meditated.
I was 21, 22 years old in the Far East.
It was all extremely exotic to me, and it just seemed like a really interesting thing to do.
So he gave me some initial instruction, and I also began a little reading.
There's one classic book called The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, which laid out the basic methodology.
And so I gathered kind of all the sitting paraphernalia cushions and this and that to sit and the very first time I set my alarm clock for five minutes because I didn't want to over sit.
But something quite amazing happened in that first five minutes and it really changed the whole course of my life.
So the first time you sat you actually connected with the practice and realized it was something worth looking into.
Well, what I realized, it wasn't that I had any great enlightenment experience, but what I realized was that there was a way to look into the mind as well as looking out through it.
And my whole life I had just been looking out, out of my mind, rather than looking into it.
So it was like a turning in place.
And just that was so extraordinary to me.
I got so excited, I started inviting my friends over to watch me meditate.
Arguably the most narcissistic thing you could possibly do.
Well, more charitably, it was naive.
It really came out of this tremendous enthusiasm for what I felt I was discovering.
Obviously, they didn't come back very often.
It made for a poor viewing experience.
Very poor.
But that was the beginning.
And then, over the course of my time in the Peace Corps, I just... I extended time past five minutes a little bit, but still... So how long did it take for you to actually go on intensive retreat?
At the end of my Peace Corps stay, I had an experience, somebody was reading from a Tibetan text, a friend was reading.
So at this point you had been meditating for, what, a year?
Yeah, maybe a year, but very intermittently.
Just an hour a day or something?
Probably not even, you know, but I was dabbling.
I was just dabbling in it and reading and going to some classes, you know, trying to find out more about it.
But just at the end of my peace course day, before I left for home, I had a really transformative experience listening to somebody read from a Tibetan text.
And it just was an experience of opening to an understanding of the mind.
And kind of in classical Buddhist terms, they talk about the unborn or the unformed, or using words like that to describe the freest aspect of the mind you know so something happened what the hell happened somebody somebody was reading this text a tibetan text
And that edition, that was a very early translation of it.
A translation which has now been... So, a faulty translation.
A faulty translation by Evans-Wentz called The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation.
There have since been much more careful translations of it.
Right.
And very powerful ones.
But even in that faulty translations... Have the new translations revised the very line you found so useful?
No.
All right, so back up.
You've got this faulty Victorian translation of the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, and you have a friend who's reading it out loud to you?
Right.
And then at one point in the reading, just on the word unborn, the mind opened to that experience.
Right.
Say more about that.
You hear this word unborn, you're looking into your mind all the while.
What changes?
So it's a momentary experience that has the power of a lightning bolt.
So it's a unique moment of the mind going from being aware of different things arising moment after moment, what sights and sounds and breath, the mind itself, and then upon hearing the word unborn, and it's very hard to describe,
But it was, if you think literally of what that word means, unborn, it's the experience of non-occurrence.
Being born is something occurring.
It's some moment after moment experience is being born and dying, being born and dying moment after moment.
is a moment of non-occurrence, which broke that stream of continual birth, of continual occurrence.
And the metaphor, or simile, one of those, right after that moment, I described it to myself as zero.
It was the experience of zero.
Right.
So the experience was, however difficult it is to characterize, it entailed the loss of ordinary sensory experience.
You're no longer seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking.
Right.
So the lights went out in some sense.
The lights went out in some sense, but there was a knowing of that.
Right.
Right.
And this gets into another, you know, a deeper discussion of that experience which we might have later.
So it is the knowing of a reality.
That doesn't entail ordinary sensory perception.
Right.
It's zero.
Right.
It's like a rebooting of the hard drive.
Yeah.
But one of the things that became so apparent is that zero is not nothing.
Zero is a powerful number, and perhaps the most powerful number.
And the fruit of that experience was the immediate understanding and realization of the selflessness of this whole process we call life, that there's no There's no one to whom it's happening.
It's a process of what one teacher described as just empty phenomena rolling on, meaning empty of self, empty of core substance.
That experience doesn't refer back to anyone.
Just understood completely in that moment.
That view of self was just completely gone.
So then take me back to the immediate aftermath of that experience.
So your friend is reading this book to you.
On the word unborn you have this cessation experience.
You come out of it.
Completely different.
Your mind is blown.
And I tell him to stop reading.
And so how long do you think you had been gone for?
Just a second.
Momentary.
Right.
And so you have this transformation and now you're articulating it to your friend?
What's that next half hour like?
The next half hour was like I was in a completely altered sense of everything.
Because it was free of any notion of self.
The self-center had just dropped away.
Right.
But this wasn't the fruit of many years of practice.
Yeah.
So I really didn't have any... I had very little context for understanding this, although I knew enough That something's familiar within the Buddhist tradition that just happened, but I didn't understand the mechanism or what led up to it or anything.
I didn't have any context.
Was there anything negative about it or scary about it?
Were you at all destabilized in a way that where you were searching to get back to who you were?
I wasn't searching to get back to who I was, but there was a period of I think some days where, yeah, it was destabilizing of my previous way of being and the conventional way of being.
So I was kind of trying to find my sea legs in all this.
Right.
But was there part of you at all that worried about it, that thought about it in psychopathological terms?
No.
Even as there was kind of uncertainty or about how to manifest.
Right.
You know, how to relate.
No, I always felt that something tremendously powerful and revealing had happened.
Right.
To stick with the immediate aftermath, was the character of your experience in that moment was changed, but if I recall correctly, you were experiencing things which now you don't necessarily tend to experience.
Now selflessness is still obvious to you, but there were features of your experience in the immediate aftermath of cessation that are not true right now.
So what was especially salient or psychedelic or otherwise odd about those next hours?
It was like it was days, too.
It was like, didn't you have a week where you felt like you were as much the other person in the room as you were yourself, or something like that?
Yeah.
But also just...
This happened 50 years ago.
Yeah.
So even though the experience is very vivid, you know, in terms of impact and understanding, some of the details, you know, have faded.
But you have had what you consider the same experience again through the practice of meditation.
I have, but not actually as dramatic as that.
The aftermath was not as dramatic, or you actually think that you can detect a different character to the cessation experience?
No, I would say the aftermath was not as dramatic.
So talk about the aftermath for a minute.
First, I told my friend to stop reading, because I knew he didn't understand what had just happened.
That he'd just destroyed your mind.
I mean, there was no point to going on.
From my perspective, I had experienced what that teaching was trying to do.
So why keep reading?
It was redundant at that point.
And so I just wandered off.
And I remember this was in a school.
It was right next to the Bangkok Zoo.
So I was just wandering around.
I was wandering around in the zoo.
Just in this place of, as you said, I mean the way you expressed it, there was no separating out of myself separate from everything that was being seen or heard.
Right.
It was all one thing.
But presumably, you can do that now, in the context of this conversation with me, but it's not quite the same thing.
No, because... What is it?
Talk about the positive characteristics of this aftermath experience that is positive, not necessarily as being good versus bad, but positive in terms of something added to the flavor of experience that's not happening for you right now.
Again, I'm not sure of this, but my sense is that it was just the newness of that experience.
And so, because it came so out of the blue and so unexpected and not as the result of a It's a bit like through the looking glass.
So the change was so dramatic, so sudden, so unexpected, so without mental preparation.
It's a bit like through the looking less.
Yeah.
All of a sudden you turned inside out.
Yeah.
Now that experience is just, and the understanding is much more familiar to me.
So I think it just doesn't have the same dramatic interest.
Right, right.
Do you think there's a difference in just your stability in that experience?
So that in the immediate aftermath of cessation, you were stabilized in that selfless awareness to a degree that is not normal in your life?
It's a little hard to say because...
And it had a half-life, right?
So it wore off, this transfigured consciousness wore off over days?
Yeah, over days.
And then you really wanted to find out what the hell had happened?
Yeah, exactly.
But this was just at the end of my Peace Corps stay.
So I was going home.
And I had no idea of what to do or how to integrate this.
But I tried talking to people about the fact that there's really no self, and the self is a construct.
People meaning your rabbi in the Berkshires?
Well, to my family when I got home, even to friends before, the friends in the Peace Corps, before I left.
This was just like a week or two before.
So there was this huge transition happening, you know, finishing my time in Thailand, going back to the States.
Obviously, people had no way of relating to what I was talking about.
So when I went home, it didn't take me long to I realized that I wanted to pursue disunderstanding.
Actually, just a little anecdote.
When I was home, I went up to a place called Chapel House at Colgate University.
It was just to go on a little retreat myself.
But this was before I had done any intensive practice.
So I went up to this place, beautiful place, upstate New York.
And they had a copy of that text there.
And so I got somebody To read me the text again, thinking, oh, maybe I can recreate this whole thing.
Read it again.
So I realized that wasn't the way.
And so then I just became motivated to go back to Asia.
This is still 1965?
No, this is 67.
I went into the Peace Corps in 65, and this happened just in the beginning months of 67.
So you were a part of that wave of Westerners going to India, the slightly early part, going to India to meet Eastern teachers of esoterica.
Yeah.
So I was going to go back to Thailand, since this is where all this happened, but I stopped in India on the way.
People had given me the names of different Indian teachers and gurus.
So I went to India and I was just wandering around to some different ashrams.
So Hindu ashrams and Buddhist?
Both, yeah.
So at this point you were not committed to Buddhism as the context for your study?
I think I was, not so much consciously, but when I went to this one Sikh ashram that teaches this, what do you call it, the inner sound?
Nod yoga?
Something like that.
So I went there and it was a very powerful, big ashram in the Punjab.
I've got tinnitus now, I could be a master of it.
Well, he was very impressive, very powerful, and everybody who went there was on the trajectory of wanting to get initiated into it.
So all the peer pressure was to go for initiation.
But there was just something in me based on this experience that said, this is not my path.
So I went for a personal interview with the Master and he wasn't trying to convince me or anything.
I said to him, it just doesn't feel the right path for me.
I think I'll go back to Thailand.
And he said, I think you should stay in India.
But not necessarily with him.
No, not with him.
So, as it turned out, that proved to be a very prescient remark.
Whether, from my perspective... It's a pity you haven't worn a turban all these years.
Right.
It would have been a very different path.
Anyway, I'm going back to the train station to go back to Delhi, to go to Thailand again.
In the rickshaw on the way to the train station, the thought pops into my mind, maybe I should go to Bodh Gaya, which is the place the Buddha was enlightened.
I go to Bodh Gaya, and at this time there are not that many Westerners.
In Bodh Gaya there were very few.
I go to this place called the Burmese Vihara where the Westerners were staying.
It was like the Burmese rest house for Burmese pilgrims.
But Burma was closed at that time, so no Burmese were coming.
So the few Westerners, there were maybe five or six Westerners, They were staying there.
I met some of them.
They were a group of Danish people.
They were studying meditation with this person named Anakarika Munindra, who had just come back from nine years in Burma and was teaching Vipassana, or insight meditation.
So he had just come back.
He had started teaching in Bodh Gaya.
So these Danish people said, you know, you'd like to meet Maninjuji.
So I went to see him.
He explained the Vipassana practice and it was an immediate connection.
It's exactly what I was looking for.
But wasn't Vipassana what you had been given in Thailand?
Not, not really.
What I had been given in Thailand was much more just the preliminary being with the breath.
Right.
So it was more like a concentration practice in a way.
Yeah.
And it was very unintensive.
You know, when I went to Manindra and he explained the practice and then I started doing it intensively, that's when I realized this is a good expression of what my experience was, had been.
Right.
Well, for our listeners who are unaware of, maybe unaware of the details of Vipassana practice, can you do just like a two-minute guided meditation?
Yeah.
Just to get us there?
After you drink that water?
Crackling water bottle would ruin our audio.
Okay, so I go to Manindraji.
He explains the basics of Vipassana practice, which is really simple.
It's the sitting meditation part, is sitting down, starting with attention on the breath, and just feeling Feeling the sensations, the experience of the breath, and being aware of moment-to-moment whatever arises.
Sensations in the body, thoughts, emotions.
So should we do a little guided meditation?
Yeah, do like a minute or two.
Okay, so if as you're listening to this you just take some comfortable posture, you know, sitting in a relaxed way.
In Vipassana, generally we close our eyes, but can also be done with the eyes open.
So sit, and you might begin by taking a few deep breaths, simply as a way of settling into the awareness of the body.
And let the breath come to its own natural rhythm.
And simply be aware or feel the sensations of each breath as it comes into the body, as it leaves the body.
It's not a breathing exercise, it's an exercise in awareness.
And so we simply use the breath as a vehicle for being aware.
As you feel the breath going in and out, You may become aware of sounds, background sounds or loud sounds.
Then simply notice a hearing.
Be aware of the experience of hearing.
How the sound comes and goes.
then returning to the breath you might begin to feel other sensations in the body Pressure, of tightness, of tingling, of vibration.
If any sensation becomes predominant, become aware of the sensation.
Notice how it changes.
when it's no longer predominant.
Again, return to the breath.
Be aware of any thoughts or images that appear in the mind as you're feeling the in-breath and out-breath.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thought may come and at first may carry you away, lost in the thought, but at a certain point you become aware that you're thinking.
You might make a soft mental note, thinking, thinking.
The highlight and emphasize the awareness of thought rather than being lost in it and notice what happens to the thought in the moment of awareness Does it continue?
Does it disappear?
here.
When the thought is no longer there, again return to the breath or bodily sensations.
So in this way we are just being mindful moment after moment of whatever is the predominant experience in the body, in the mind.
And through that awareness, we begin to see the changing nature of all these phenomena.
Things are arising and passing away.
And in the awareness of this process of change, The mind no longer clings.
And the mind of non-clinging, of non-grasping, is really the essence of the Vipassana practice.
Well, that's great.
So, a few things to point out there.
One is, that is the whole practice.
In a very short span, you can give more or less the entire practice.
There's tweaking of the dials that you may want to emphasize for someone.
In the middle of a three-month retreat, or given whatever they happen to be experiencing, but in seed form, the whole logic of the practice was just given.
What's unique about Vipassana, and I think the reason why it has been adopted by so many clinicians and now scientists who are studying meditation, is that one, it doesn't require that you add anything strategically to your experience.
repeating a mantra, you're not visualizing something, you don't have to develop an interest in or sympathy for historical figures or imaginary, potentially imaginary figures, you know, deities in Hinduism or the Tibetan Buddhist canon.
And so it really is just paying closer attention to whatever happens to be happening.
In that moment, in the mind and body.
And the other very important feature of it is that it, in principle, doesn't exclude anything.
So this.
So you don't need a quiet room.
You don't need a comfortable body.
In principle, anything you notice is as good as any other object of meditation.
And that, virtually every other practice doesn't, can't meet those two tests.
So I think it's Perfectly designed for export to a secular scientific audience, because it stands to reason... It's just life.
It's just life.
And if you want to know something more about what it's like to be you, and what could possibly be discovered through introspection, it makes sense to pay attention.
Exactly.
All this is, is paying attention.
When I first met Manindraji in Bodhgaya, when I went to meet him, he said something that was so... the common sense of it was so striking to me.
It's really what was a big hook for me.
He said, if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.
That was all.
There was nothing to believe.
There was nothing to join.
It was just that, how else can we understand our minds except by observing?
So, the accessibility of it and the common sense of it was so striking to me.
Of course, as we do the practice, there are many, many dimensions of our experience that reveal themselves that previously we had not been aware of.
Yeah.
So it goes very deep into, with tremendous nuance, but the basic instruction is this simple.
Yeah, it's always a matter of not being lost in thought about the experience, noticing thought as thought, and noticing the character of experience with interest and without grasping at pleasant and pushing away the unpleasant.
Just simply always being aware of what's arising.
And I think one thing that people get confused about is I mean obviously there's a vast amount that the brain is doing and that therefore the mind is doing that we're not aware of and that is not best discovered through introspection.
Hence the necessity of having whole branches of science named psychology and neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science and linguistics and everything else.
I'm following the rules of English grammar more or less effortlessly to get to the end of the sentence.
I have no idea how I'm doing that, and when I fail to do that, I have no idea why I fail, and the best way to discover those details is not by me paying attention, because it's simply not visible.
The data are not there, but what mindfulness is, is a tool To be as aware as possible of the actual character of your subjective experience.
It's not to say this is the best way to do neuroscience.
It's the best way to be aware of what it's like to be you in every moment.
And it's in that context that you can discover whether or not this thing you call yourself exists the way you have always thought it does.
And it's also It's very pragmatic in another sense, because one of the things we discover through this simple introspection and observation is to see what patterns of thought and emotion create suffering for ourselves and others, and how to be free of that suffering.
And that's really the bottom line of why to do it.
Right.
You know, it's a way of coming out of suffering.
And we become much more expert in terms of understanding our own minds and our own conditioning.
Because we all have established habit patterns that are not helpful.
They're not conducive to peace, not conducive to freedom.
We need to learn about that.
We need to see how all of that's happening.
So take me back to, so now you're with Manindra in Bodh Gaya, and he's making a lot of sense and has given you a practice that seems very promising in light of this experience you had had in Thailand.
What is your motivation at that point?
Is your motivation a Is it interest in the nature of the mind?
Is it getting rid of suffering that you're finding intolerable?
For me, interest was the key.
I didn't have any obvious suffering.
I was just still very young.
I was 23 years old.
I was just incredibly interested at this point.
in the mind and exploring the implications and ramifications of what this experience was.
And upon this further investigation, I realized that Buddhism really explained it all.
This was the most appropriate context for the exploration.
So at that point had you gone and met other gurus apart from that one Sikh?
Had you met Muktananda or Anandamayi Ma?
No, I had gone up to the Himalayas to try to find some Tibetan teachers since it had been in Tibetan text.
But it was in the middle of winter and I was freezing cold and the Tibetans had all gone south, so nobody was there.
No, and so Manindra was really, aside from that one ashram I had gone to, he was the first teacher I met and I feel very fortunate because it was just exactly what I was looking for.
Right.
But you did do some practice in another tradition of the pastime, because you sat Goenka retreat as well, right?
That was after.
After, okay.
You get to Bodh Gaya, you meet Manindra.
How long did you stay in India at this point?
That very first time I was in India, I stayed for about six weeks or two months, and then I was going back to the States.
And when I started, I had no concentration.
So it's almost like I was practicing to catch up to the experience I had had.
Right.
Because I hadn't done any of the mental development that in the normal course of things would have culminated in that.
Right.
And so when I started to actually... So you were not a prodigy, a meditational prodigy, from the side of actually doing the practice?
Not at all.
In fact, I think quite the opposite.
So what's interesting is that this breakthrough cessation experience, as a starting point, why wouldn't that have made you a prodigy?
The only prodigy aspect that I could discern There was no doubt.
Doubt about the path had been eliminated.
Because I had this very clear understanding and realization of the selflessness of it all.
But I saw also that there was still a lot more work to do.
There was still a lot of conditioned habit patterns of mind that were still there.
So even though I knew they were selfless, I had that basic understanding still And when you sat down to meditate with Menindra, you're spending virtually all your time lost in thought because you don't have concentration.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And enjoying it.
I was like, this could be a nice way to spend an hour.
Right.
Cross your legs and think.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is basically what I did.
But I knew I had found the path made sense to me, even though that it was not easy.
But I didn't have any doubt.
I knew, yeah, this is what I want to do.
So I went back to the States, worked for a little while, made a little more money, and just, you know, was anxious to get back to India and to pursue it.
When I went back, I got inspired to do the meditation on loving kindness.
Metta.
Metta.
That's the Pali word.
I had just come to a realization that I felt that this was a quality that I could well develop in myself.
You know, I feel a little lacking in myself and I started lacking in the world.
So I was very inspired.
Can you just describe what that practice is?
You don't need to do a guided metta practice.
The way metta is done, or one way it's done traditionally, is just to think of somebody, you start with a benefactor, somebody for whom you have good feeling, loving feeling, and you visualize them.
And repeat certain phrases of loving-kindness, of well-wishing.
You know, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be free of suffering.
And it really becomes a mantra of loving-kindness.
You know, where you're repeating the phrases, directing them to the image.
And then there's a progression going from a benefactor to a friend, to somebody who's neutral, to somebody who's difficult for you, and then to all beings.
So it's a gradually expanding field of loving-kindness.
And unlike mindfulness, in this practice there's a target mental state you're trying to kindle and to hold in the mind, and to grow and deepen, and there's a very explicit goal in terms of the mental state you're trying to produce.
Yes.
Actually, there are two aspects to it.
One is the development of the feeling of loving-kindness, but it is also a concentration technique.
It can also be used to develop concentration as well as the feeling of loving-kindness.
For me, I was doing this loving-kindness meditation intensively, also for about six weeks or two months.
So this is all day, every day.
So you're on retreat now?
I'm on retreat, yeah.
And it was in doing that practice that, for the first time, my mind developed some concentration and it was quite remarkable.
I mean, it's a whole new inner space.
And before, even though I had no doubt about the practice and I was committed to doing it, It was really difficult.
You know, it was work.
So your first time, you had had periods that were periods of intensive practice on retreat doing vipassana where you hadn't broken through?
No.
So your first period of retreat was doing metta?
No, the first six weeks, when I first went to Bodh Gaya, I was doing Vipassana.
Vipassana.
But for like ten hours a day?
Yeah.
And still just feeling the effects of not having concentration?
Right.
Right.
No, I was continually trying to bring my mind back and be present.
It was hard work.
But I had no doubt about it.
I wanted to do it.
But you were a hard case, because many, many people do a 10-day or 3-week retreat of Vipassana for the first time, and at some point in that retreat, they really do experience kind of effortless concentration.
No, I didn't.
And that's why for me, now as a teacher, I have tremendous confidence in people being able to do it.
Because if I could do it, anybody could do it, because my mind was so unconcentrated.
But the Metta really, that established my mind in a degree of concentration.
Not fantastic, but sufficient.
And it changed everything, because once the mind develops a certain level of concentration, then the practice becomes much more effortless.
Right.
You know, there's a momentum to the practice and it becomes much more enjoyable.
And so doing that period of The Loving Highness was really important for me in the whole trajectory.
And then, at a certain point, I went back to Vipassana and then just proceeded to continue with Vipassana going through.
So how long did you stay in India this time?
I was in India over a seven-year period, and I was back and forth to the States maybe two times, two or three times in that period for a few months at a time.
So I was mostly in India.
Mostly in India for about seven years.
Mostly in Bodhgaya?
Bodhgaya during the winter months, up in, we would go to the mountains in the summer months.
Dalhousie area?
Yeah, Dalhousie.
It was very, very hot in the plains in the summer.
So during this period, so you're basically in India for seven years, and now this is the period where a real influx of Westerners is now noticeable.
You've got Ram Dass and the whole party coming through Bodh Gaya and doing Goenka retreats.
So you studied with Goenka as well during that period?
I did.
Starting in 1970, I started doing Goenka retreats, which was also very powerful.
It was a very powerful But I had a major obstacle.
So when I first started doing GoAnka, which is a body scanning.
So the difference being you don't focus on the breath as a primary point of contact.
You actually very strategically move through the body, noticing sensation from your toes to your head and back again.
Right.
He does, he does emphasize using the breath for the first few days of a 10 day retreat.
For concentration.
For concentration.
And then it opens up to the body scan.
Right.
So when I first started doing that, I'd already been with Menindra for a few years, and my body, it totally opened up.
It just became a body of light, you know, and it's wonderful.
It was just a free flow of energy.
Unpack that phrase.
It can sound a little spooky, body of light.
What do you mean by body of light?
You weren't literally glowing.
From the inside, it felt like it.
But usually we experience the body as somewhat dense and solid, but through this intensive body scanning, up and down, we begin to experience the body as an energy field, meaning just a field of flowing sensations with no solidity anyplace.
And so it's just this free flow of energy.
It's very enjoyable.
And so I got into that, but just spent hours and hours and hours in that, very effortless.
Then I had to go back to the States.
Maybe I'd run out of money or went back for a couple of months.
When I came back to India, I had lost my body of light, and it had become like a body of twisted steel, and I could not recreate that experience.
And for two years, I was struggling to get that back.
Struggling in the context of... Meditation.
With Goenka or with Menindra?
No, with Goenka.
So you spent two years doing the Goenka style?
Oh, more.
I spent close to four years.
Three and a half years doing that style.
So it had started off gloriously, and then it had crashed.
But of course, mindful, the point of the practice is not to recreate any specific body manifestation.
Correct, but... It was too seductive.
It was too seductive, and yeah, I was just doing it wrong.
Right.
But... And did Quanta give you instruction?
No, not really.
Because there was a lot of emphasis in that tradition to get that free flow.
So that was, in a way, the goal.
And so it was exceedingly frustrating.
It was the worst two years of my practice.
And it took me two years to realize that it's not about getting something back, but to be with how things are.
So finally, and it took a long, long time, Finally, my mind let go of that fixation and just relaxed into how things were, and then there started to be movement again.
It never got back to how it was, but it didn't matter.
You know, that there's a different kind of flow.
So that was its own learning, you know, in terms of understanding what the practice really is about and what it's not about.
That's a point of interest to me, which we've argued about in other contexts, but it's interesting the way in which the logic of a practice, explicit or implicit, can lead you to practice in a way that is just not profitable.
There's a very classic progression in what are called the stages of insight.
So this is a very classic unfolding of different experiences where people at a certain stage have experiences of tremendous rapture and clarity and concentration and all the things that we're practicing to develop.
At this particular stage, they're called corruptions of insight, because the tendency is for almost everybody, in one way or another, to get attached to them.
It's such a remarkable shift from anything that's happened before, that when you're experiencing that, it just feels you've arrived.
It's the flavor of enlightenment.
It seems like, this is why I was practicing in the first place.
I want to feel this way.
Exactly.
And it's called pseudo-nirvana.
And so it takes some real guidance at that point to simply be mindful of those states.
as other changing conditions and not to be attached to it.
And the very next stage of insight is called seeing what is the path and what is not the path.
And that's an important juncture because until that point, we think that having those experiences is the path. - Yeah, yeah.
And so we have to really go through that and see that it's not the path, that that's just experiences along the way, and that the whole path is always about letting go.
It's not about holding on.
Yeah.
And whatever is fundamental to the nature of mind has to be discoverable in the context of whatever experience happens to be present.
If the thing you're taking to be significant is there by virtue of having some contingent conditions in place, then obviously it's vulnerable to change.
Exactly.
I like to say in the teaching, in guiding people through situations like this, if freedom is dependent on conditions, it's not freedom.
Just take me back to that period, to that now you're an inboat guy, you've been there for years, now you're just practicing in a Buddhist context, you're not going to be being part of the Bhagavata or Anandamayi Maharaj.
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