| | Hi, Jake — Thank you. But, um, yes — without meaning to disparage friends and others — I know lots of Maine groups (Tibetan, Zen, Insight, etc.; I promoted the first website, in the late ’90s, that collected and listed all of them in one place) but none that, to my knowledge, took Daniel's essential message as their focus: "Do the practices in the traditional way, and you will get the traditional results." Talk of actual enlightenment, in this lifetime, was not considered reasonable or polite to bring up (though, again, I don't know every group; I'd be happy to be proved wrong). We kind of just wandered. Or at least: I was a certified meditation instructor with lots of students, a certified assistant weekend retreat director, a co-leader of countless classes, a retreatant on two continents, and the bearer of lots of other credentials and special pins and secret books — and it's a certainty that *I*, for one, kind of just wandered....
Anyway, also, as you happened to mention about yourself, I'm pretty sure I'm tired of groups per se. What I'm hoping to find at this point is a hardcore practitioner or two in Maine (or Boston, etc., somewhere I could drive to), sitting their asses off in insight meditation and willing to help me get started on the right foot. I have (potentially dumb) questions about what exactly a sensation is and what my noting of it is supposed to consist of. But before I pose these and waste other people's time, I plan to reread the instructions in Daniel's book with real how-to-do-it attention.
So: Hello, Maine? Northern New England? Thanks, everyone. |