I spent a little over two weeks after the Vipassana meditation center in Pecatonica, a very small town outside Rockford, Illinois. I served a ten day course and then stayed on an additional week, giving some Dhamma service. It is a really beautiful center and promises a new experience of anicca everytime one visits, if only for how radically it changes from one season to the next! I was there later in the fall season for the first time, around the middle of October, for a short three day course that I attended as a student. Then I worked a maddening but very rewarding four week intensive ESL Teacher Training course in Chicago before returning again.
I realize I'm coming out of a rather long and painful sankhara (I hope!) of the meditation seeming more like a duty than the dynamic exploration of self and mind that it promises to be. If there's even that tenth of one percent rebelling against the purification process, it can be just excrutiating to continue. But even this one tenth is also anicca, also arising and passing! (though it sure may not seem like that at times) To stop allowing one the indulgence of rolling in thoughts and thought patterns can be as scary as jumping off a big cliff and trusting you'll be taken care of-- it's like an escape from the comfortable and familiar patterns of the ego and the years and years of conditioning, that desparately don't want to have to accept what destruction and suffering they can produce on one's life. Like guests in a house that suddenly wish to be the owners, or spybots on a computer that force it to function in unproductive manners... but to see them for what they are, and then that freshness of the moment can get restored!
"O foolishness of man to seek
Salvation in an ordre logic
O cruel intellect that chills
His natural warmth until it kills
The roots of all togetherness!"
-- W.H. Auden, New Year Letter
Here are some pictures of the cold! The walk to the dormitory above, and the very frigid conditions reflected on my face below!!!
Question: I can understand meditation will help maladjusted, unhappy people, but how can it help someone who already feels satisfied with his life, who is already happy?
"Someone who remains satisfied with the superficial pleasures of life is ignorant of the agitation deep within the mind. He is under the illusion that he is a happy person, but his pleasures are not lasting and the tensions generated at the deep levels of the mind keep increasing, to appear sooner or later at the surface of the mind. When that happens, this so-called 'happy' person becomes miserable. So why not start working here and now to deal with that situation?"
--S.N. Goenka, modern teacher of Vipassana meditation
I think about how agitated I got during the Teacher Training course when
I had to buy a plane ticket for 2006, and I became convinced the cause of this agitation must be the fact that I hadn't yet purchased the ticket. And then once I did, all that anxiety remained intact, only got shifted over to figuring out exact employment notes for spring 2006. Hours and energy I didn't have went in to this conundrum as well. And then I suddenly realized I had been bamboozled again! My own impurities within and here I was trying to rectify eveything outside. So I started observing sensation, respiration again, again...
Much of the last week I spent alone at the center, and it seemed about as long as the previous ten days. I had met such a host of very interesting and inspiring people, and now I was with myself again :) And watching the geese that came closer and the muskrat who would hit the graceful birds in the backside like a torpedo nearly had me doubled over in laughter. And the more I found myself being able to give, the greater depths of selfishness I began to discover! O dukkha, dukkah...
Now back in Colorado but leaving shortly for a drive through the Southwest (and a cool looking onsen in New Mexico) to Los Angeles. The weather keeps getting warmer!
Here are two more photos below, both of the mens' waiting area just outside the meditation hall. So beautiful that it pulled many a new student away from the timetable of the camp! The first is taken inside, the second outside...
NO, silly, of course that's not where I stayed. But it actually was in the Loop, very close to where I stayed, and I did see it. The only difference is, it was on exhibit in the Art Institute of Chicago, and each of these rooms are barely a foot in height and depth! Here is an actual photo of the condo where I stayed...
And here is another photo I took at the Art Institute I found very humorous (to the left). Usually in New-Age type magazines where they market the mystic Eastern yogic and meditative practices, they have these people in peaceful poses of relaxation and joy. When really truth-in-advertising meditation should show the sitter hunched over in some way... which is what I liked about this statue... and feeling like some limb is just about to fall off!
