Vipassana II

         When you wake up the first morning at four a.m., after receiving the first instruction of the course the night before, which is sometimes taught through videos of almost an hour and a half, a monologue by one of the masters who spread this technique in the West , S.N. Goenka, you still can't see where your choice brought to and which wanted consequences it will have.
It's not like the feeling of wanting a horse without knowing how to ride it. It was more like: I'm ready to ride it, but where is the horse.
That feeling wasn't strange.  The teaching had to be developed in levels, which as concentric circles would become wider and wider until allowing the access to the technique and how it would make sense for the life of whom will practice it.

There were three conditions for this to happen.

        Sila, 
are the moral precepts, pillars for the code of conduct. They are the condition, the amniotic fluid where to raise the awareness necessary to acquire the technique.

        Don't kill any living beings. The food they offered was all strictly vegetarian, various soups always accompanied by rice. One day, they made a surprise. Spaghetti and you could see the Japanese eating them with a fork and not the typical chopsticks.

         Don't steal from others. And how could you do it? All your belongings and valuables were taken at beginning of the course.

         Don't have sexual misconduct. The separation between males and females was clear, marked by signs, boundaries drawn on the ground. No walls or guards and everyone respected the border.

         Do not drink any alcohol or use drugs.  Their use would spoil the search for truth by the mind, the truth necessary to absorb the technique.

        Don't lie. Here is the reason for the Noble Silence. If you can't talk, then you can't lie. Very extreme, but very effective.     

       They didn't tell me anything new. Indeed it seemed to me a much easier code; five commandments instead of ten would be pretty easy to respect.

         Samadhi,
The equanimity  of the mind. It is the pillar on which consolidate the technique for a life without pain, the impenetrable wall where any external reality and its representation in us would never penetrate.

         In the first two days there was a loose interpretation on the instructions that were always given the night before. Those were preparatory days. They served to understand only one particular aspect of the technique, which would give access to its general structure.
         Specifically, one had to learn to stay focused, avoiding all thought, on the breathing. Letting the breath, an automatic process of the body that does not require the mind to work, be free without any thoughts of it. Sometimes it happened that the mind wandered and the focus got lost. Don't worry. All we had to do was go back to the breathing and keeping on focusing. And so for eleven hours a day between the big meditation hall and our accommodation we trained on it .
I don't mention the noisy meditation of some of my roommates.

I said 'loose interpretation' because everyone could sit in their own way, for a time of its choice. The important thing was to learn to stay focused.
 
        I didn't understand the purpose of that exercise. In the evening videos, Goenka explained how the technique was not sectarian, that it had a universal and eternal message. It did not need a God to worship with rituals or prayers. There was only man with himself, with his traumas and his suffering. Only by learning to feel truly yourself, your body, and the entire world with them, you could eradicate that evil that made all of us unhappy. Only by achieving the equanimity of the mind we could have understood the source of all our suffering. Then I decided to give it time.

        Paññā,
Wisdom. It's the cement that would break the reality. It is the achievement of absolute, sure, doubtless awareness of the three truths about the world around us and about us, about their false reality.

        Anicca,
        the temporary, the impermanence. 
The world is composed by atoms, atoms that break up and then recompose. Also confirmed by subatomic physics. The things around us are destined to end, to change. All the time. In that case, Goenka gave a fine example.
        On a woman's hair, we find them beautiful, when they are taken well cared for and we compliment the woman and her beauty for that. Then when the same hair is found in our rice plate, then we find them disgusting and ugly. Transformation and destruction of atoms.

        Dukkha,
        Misery or the world as suffering.
        It's true, the world is shit. You suffer, you are stressed, frustrated, for a life that seems to have no meaning, for wishes that we cannot achieve, for a freedom that we cannot express. But all this is the product of our illusion. We believe in things out there. Everything that makes us sad or happy has no consistency, durability, concrete reality. Everything is always passing by. We would not be any longer, as the same everything else. Why then we become attached to them, cling to desires on them? It is us who feed the misery of the world with our illusion that something will be permanent in front of us, and ever more sticking to it because we do not want to let go.
Goenka takes the example of the monk who enters in the river. Once inside it's never the same water that will bathe him. Everything is in constant changing. 
 
        Anattā,
        the non-existence of our self, of our own identity.
Last act of wisdom: since everything starts with us, since we are the ones who get lost in the reality of the world, it is one step further and we discover at same time that we are illusions too, or at least our Self. Our identity is built by the world we are in , by the others who judge us. Actually, it doesn't exist.
Here Goenka sets the example of Buddha. What did he do? For days and days he began to meditate to find a answer to the world's misery. And he got the enlightenment. It all starts with us. As we become aware of that, of the fact that our own Self is nothing that a changing of atoms. From that point of truth he began to teach the meditative technique of Vipassana, the only way to achieve an awareness if not similar, but very close to it.

         And that's how the third day began, and how I, prepared to ride my bike on the flat, started to go uphill.

          From the third day we were instructed that of the eleven hours a day, in only three, morning, afternoon and evening, we were asked to meditate sitting, with closed eyes, with crossed legs, without opening our hands for the whole hour.

What pain, what a suffering. You were getting up from that hour with your legs dumb, with pains in your back, shoulders and neck. Sometimes I wanted to run away, sometimes I wanted to pretend I was there, sometimes I couldn't do it. And yet I was always sitting there trying, understanding, refusing the simplest solution.

        Goenka in the videos predicted what was happening to us, cheering us up, telling us not giving up, to keep on, to seek in the equanimity of the mind the dissolution of all pain. That all the sensations that we felt through our bodies, from positive to painful, were transient, impermanent.
Aniccia repeated Goenka, between one recorded song and another.
Aniccia whispered to us the sensations that passed through every single part of the body accompanied by sweat dripping pain. 

That was the Vipassana technique: the union of mind and body, of awareness and equanimity of mind, of sensation and impermanence.

        Sati
awareness. 
        Without it, no Vipassana meditation would be possible at all. Only with the full possession of an attitude that start from our inner self,  an attitude that accepts our most private sensations for what they are, an attitude of not get involved in the pain or pleasure that they give us, is possible to understand the world for what is, and us with it, the reality as it is.

        That awareness together with the equanimity of the mind worked for me. I noticed that with the days I could feel less and less pain. Becoming aware of the sensations that flowed over all the parts of the body, letting them go, because the nature of the sensations is like of all things, they come and go away. Because in the equanimity of mind nothing stays for ever.
I noticed that as soon as I lost that equanimity and began to worry about a sensation in my leg, foot or shoulder, the pain set itself free again in my thought. And the first thing I had to do was to come back not easily and accept it for what it was, and then let it pass away for what it never was. And I got better.

       The next step of this union, awareness  and equanimity, was to bring out all those sensations, now fixed, locked within us, like our deepest traumas, to dissolve them and let them go. Because the pain was not only given by the posture which everybody of us had chosen to meditate but also by a whole series of obsessions, manias, phobias that had accumulated within us, and which we keep alive because we believe in them as something real that they are not.
Everything passes, everything changes.

        On the last night, Goenka's last video offered a bet. 

He told about a bit of his life: a successful man in his community, but also a miserable and unhappy man. How with the discovering of Vipassana technique he changed his life. The example was not so much about the happy ending kind of example. It was more about focusing on one episode in particular.

After two days of training, he wanted to abandon learning the technique. He didn't see anything useful in it. And then it could clash with his role as a Hindu representative in his community. The fate was that someone advised him to stay, to give the technique a time, which would cost him nothing. And he did, thus he became a better person.

       The idea expressed was:

Even if you do not agree with all the parts of the vipassana theory, even if there are things that are difficult for you to respect for now, such as the silas precepts, do not worry. Try it.

What disadvantage should come from to put in use the vipassana meditation, for a precise period of time, for example a year?  

If it turns out to have been useless, what would you have lost? Just a little bit of time given to meditation. Nothing more. Your life won't be any worse than what it was already.

On the contrary, if after a year the technique starts to work, you will feel better, you will start to accept the world as it is. And its theoretical parts and moral code will begin to make sense to you. You'll find yourself following them without realizing it.

        So should I bet? 

It seems there is nothing to lose.