| | Dear Garrett,
I am not trying to be dismissive or arrogant or make needless judgements, but I am trying to delineate insight practice from other things, such as psychotherapy, and MCTB goes to great lengths to make this point.
If the instructions of insight practice were something like, "Make a mental note about each category of sensations as they arise, such as feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, etc.", and something took that to mean, "Spend your time on the cusion worried about your girlfriend", then there is something to be said for helping people try to see how those instructions are different. Do you see the difference?
It is reasonable to try to get people to follow the instructions and to understand them. Further, that perhaps 80-90% of Westerners on most "insight" meditation retreats actually can't hear and follow instructions as simple as, "Notice the sensations that make up experience arise and vanish regardless of what they are," or, "Make a quiet, simple mental note about sensations as they arise", would seem to warrant something compensatory for such a truly extraordinary situation, particularly that these are people who often had managed to follow other simple instructions in order to get the jobs that got them their Priuses and organic vegetables.
The fear and shame are also unique aspects of Western culture, things that MCTB goes out of its way to try to counter, such as by saying not to beat yourself up about things, not to be hard on yourself, but instead try to follow basic instructions and make it fun and very interesting.
I make no apologies at all for trying to clarify these essential practice points.
As someone mentioned in the analogy about learning math which also appears in MCTB: how well would this fly in any other type of class? Imagine if I was studying guitar and the teacher told me to practice a C Major scale and instead I said that I spent the time worrying about my girlfriend,
or if I was studying automechanics and the teacher said to disassemble the front end of the car and instead I spent the time worrying about my girlfriend,
or if I was trying to learn how to do karate and instead of doing my kata I spent the time standing there in the dojo worrying about my girlfriend,
or if I was trying to learn how to sail a boat and instead spent the time sitting on the shore worrying about my girlfriend:
in each case, you would be forced to come to the conclusion that the I had something pretty wrong with me, in that I either couldn't follow simple instructions, or I didn't care about the topic and only came there to worry about my girlfriend, or some combination of both, but regardless you might consider me to be a pretty terrible student and profoundly distracted and, in fact, nearly incapacitated by my worrying about my girlfriend.
This is the same.
By pointing out that people spend entire retreats not following very simple instructions and being basically incapacitated by their neurotic preoccupations, I am not doing anything stranger than that.
This is a skill. There are very simple instructions. You practice by following those caveman-simple instructions. If you are so wrapped up in something else that you can't do that, you probably should seek some sort of help for your degree of dysfunction. It is that simple.
That we as a culture have so many people who are so profoundly preoccupied with our neurotic crap that we can't follow the very basic instructions of insight practices is really sad and scary, but that doesn't change the basic points made above.
Why would you try to rationalize that people who come to a class and don't even follow the basic instructions aren't doing something wrong? It is a strange thing to think. Would you think it about any other situation, such as those above?
Imagine if every day you told your teachers in school, "I am sorry, I can't pay any attention to anything you say, can't do the lessons you assign to me, can't answer questions about the lesson plan, can't do my homework, and can't be expected to take the tests, as I am so worried about my girlfriend." Do you see how totally dysfunctional that is? It is the same with vipassana practice, just like all those other totally ordinary learning situations.
This is not arrogance. This is simple common sense, common sense that applies to basically any other class you would take to learn any other teachable skill.
What is so hard to understand about this?
Daniel |