Guns' Blog

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Countdown to Vipassana

Three days from today, I will pack a rather unusual bag and drive 4 hours to North Fork, Calif., to begin a 10-day Vipassana retreat.

A few years ago, I first read Mark Epstein's "Thoughts Without and Thinker" and reflected on the inadequacies of our current religious practice, and how ritual has eliminated any semblance of peace and sprituality. Epstein's book beautifully spoke to the complex creature that someone like me has become - an often confused product of a birth and upbringing in an Eastern tradition abundantly peppered with mysticsm and rigid ritual; and a Western rational education, living and working in an environment more Rational than Mystic. Epstein's book wonderfully explained the roots of unhappiness from both the Western and Eastern point of view - estrangement and entaglement - clearly painted non-judgmental awareness as the means to cope with it, and illustrated how buddhist meditation technique was the way to realize and internalize it.

Somewhat like the occassional glimpses of the ground when flying over a thin shroud of low clouds, I saw the theme recur with amazing consistency -- in Christ's (hidden) teachings as revealed by the Gnostic Gospels, in the immediacy with which a child approaches life (Dhruv has been an amazing teacher), and in the teachings of so many Hindu scriptures that we've never understood because of the maze of ritual, inability to understand the sanskrit language, or plain laziness.

I bought books on meditation, even went (dragging Sandhya) to a day-long (we lasted 1/2 a day) meditation retreat at a Korean Buddhist monastery in Berkeley, and tried doing it myself. The potential of the technique of breath observation was immediately apparent, but the critical mass of peace that is required for it to become internalized never quite built up.

And then came M ("Yum") Ramesh, a terribly successful, yet profoundly humble friend and classmate from business school. Yum lives in Mumbai and works for McKinsey, a job widely regarded as the top of the stress pyramid. Yum had been introduced to Vipassana at Igatpuri, near Mumbai, headquarters of SN Goenka's Vipassana Organization, and has been back several times. I respect his opinion greatly, and he had only good things to say of it.

Serendipity! SN Goenka was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR shortly thereafter, and the clarity and simplicity with which he explained the source of our unhapiness and how Vipassana helps us eliminate it convinced me that this was what I was looking for.

Many months later, here I am, calming my mind a few days before I leave. A large part of me is fearful - many friends have told me of how a vast majority of people leave within the first few days because they cannot bear being with themselves so much. Others have warned of the extreme physical discomfort of being in the Sierra foothills in cold January. The schedule of a 4 am start every day, a complete "noble silence" for 9 days, and just tea with milk and fruits after 12:00 noon is intimidating enough.

Sandhya jokes that I am often all talk and little action -- I have been telling all and sundry for months of my plans to go for this retreat. Maybe a part of me believed that if I set myself up I will be embarassed enough to stay the entire 10 days instead of running away and having to face the world at large with my failure. Who knows if that will work...?

So I turn to Epstein again. He reassures me that the outcome can only be good and I begin to look forward to the retreat. As you can well imagine there are numerous small work related loose ends that keep trying to whittle away at my resolve and get me to think about canceling. I hope nothing really big comes up - I have been able to manage the small things thus far.


 
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