Vipassana

Is Vipassana Meditation another religion? Pros and cons of the technique

“Religion is the opium of the masses” (Karl Marx) The following pages pretend to critically analyse the technique of meditation denominated Vipassana highlighting from my own stance the criticisms but also the benefits from the ten-day course. I will first expose my standpoint argument: any religion neglects freedom and represents an excuse for a person to avoid the responsibility of her/his life. Vipassana mandates to avoid specific behaviours, encouraging a specific laudable conduct but through obedience, not by spontaneity of freedom. The paper will firstly discuss matters of freedom and spontaneity with the aid of the authors Ortega y Gasset and Fromm. Then I will utilize such discussion to criticize the technique and finally I will underline other criticisms and benefits that I received after completing two courses of Vipassana Meditation. Freedom is a difficult concept to tackle. I find three layers of freedom. The first one, offered by the laws invented by men: if you break the law, thou shall lose your ‘freedom’ behind bars. The second is offered by capitalism: if you can afford to be free, you can choose your friends, what to purchase, freedom of speech, how to spend your spare time among few others. But, there is an underlying layer very difficult to grasp. Within the system, no one is utterly and thoroughly free since the necessity for money will deprive spontaneity of actions. “I am myself and my circumstances” (Ortega y Gasset, 1957:142); if we accept this, that life is the sum of ego and circumstance, then this circumstance is oppressive … there is a continual dialectical exchange of forces between the person and his or her circumstances and, as a result, life is a drama that exists between necessity and freedom (Ortega y Gasset, 1966) ever since, for each individual, the circumstance of necessity for money is present. If the human being will not be able to be completely free, then let us try to define the highest level of freedom possible. A shallow definition for freedom would be the absence of external pressure: “the complete realization of the positive freedom is established in the oneness and individuality of a person” (Fromm, 1947:23). However, within the self, there is an internal pressure: an ‘internal authority’, or conscience, that neglects freedom and Gabriel Alba

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deprives the individual to act according with her/his essence. “Conscience is a slavery self imposed by men, obliging her/him to act according with the desires and goals that s/he believes of her/his own, when in reality they are nothing but the external requirements of society that have become internal” (Ibid., at 108). The first and most important critique to the course resides, precisely, in the fact that Vipassana builds conscience, neglecting freedom. I will start with this one in order to prove my argument. “The foundation of the practice is sīla — moral conduct” (http://www.dhamma.org/en/code.shtml). Sīla consists in following five precepts: to abstain from i) killing any being, ii) stealing, iii) any sexual activity, iv) telling lies and v) from all intoxicants. One is supposed to follow these external requirements in daily life (http://www.dhamma.org/en/os/osguide.htm) obeying to a bright new conscience built by the technique. I contend that the path to follow without neglecting freedom is to be internally truly free to kill, for instance. The actual feeling of being capable within yourself, within your head to kill, but restrain the possibility to do so spontaneously by realizing the causes and consequences of doing such deed. However, when observing sīla, the “self”-restriction of not killing does not come from spontaneity but from the conscience that generates fear of going to hell or, in the case of Vipassana, of stopping the path to reach Nirvana. In his discourses, that I will discuss further later, Goenka claims that people accept doctrines out from fear or from expectation. Since “Vipassana is subtly described as the one true path to liberation” (Singh, 2007:12), the participants submit to sīla because they expect to be liberated at some point; if not in this life, in the next one, or in the next one, but the expectation is definitely there. The argument of this document is: any religion neglects freedom and represents an excuse for a person to avoid the responsibility of her/his life. I already showed how Vipassana separates a person from her/his real freedom. Now I am going to try tackling the issue of responsibility. “I alone am responsible for my life”, each individual has to embrace her/his own life and make it her/his own. Catholics finish any phrase that is conjugated in future tense with the ‘suffix’ “if God wants”. It is a long discussion, which I will not embark into, to conclude whether we have control of our lives or if there is a predetermined fate for each of us. In any case, what I intend to articulate is that a person lays on religion to excuse her/his lack of perseverance, her/his slothfulness and lack of own effort by saying that it was meant to be. Vis-àvis Vipassana, the technique teaches that observing sīla is the only important Gabriel Alba

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thing to do regardless the atrocities that happen in the world… you are not responsible for anything else. This leads to an unproved consideration picked from little details that are not strong enough to prove anything. Nonetheless, it is a mere suggestion that I do not mean to demonstrate: it occurred to me that Vipassana approves capitalism without questioning it. Such small details are: i) “the teaching of equanimity is explicit” (Singh, 2007:18). If equanimity leads your acts, you will not react. Hence, you will lack character depriving the feelings to react to something that is wrong; e.g the awful things that the system attains: necessity of poverty, environmental degradation, money as the ultimate goal, etc. You are supposed to stay still without reacting, to let it just pass… This is confirmed with ‘The Ultimate truth of misery’: there is misery in the world, that is a fact and you have to learn to observe it without reacting to it when in reality is the ultimate flaw of the system, which at the same time is necessary for its appropriate functioning. ii) The technique is widespread around the world; it is globalized, just like capitalism. This is merely a coincidence but still a curious one. And finally, iii) returning to good conduct, it recognizes private property since you are supposed “to refrain from stealing” (Singh, 2007:4) when in reality you cannot have anything! Such verb is difficult to explain. Possessions are not an extension of your Self, it is an extension of your self and is a language mistake: e.g. this is not my laptop, it is the laptop I am using now but I am not blended with the laptop, my Self and the laptop are not one. A possession increases egoism, because ‘what is mine is mine’ and is not yours and I do not care how deeply you need it, you have to buy your own… You have to let go! If you let go the attachment to the laptop, it will reduce your ego. The technique neglects, which is remarkably good and necessary, the ‘I’, the ‘me’, the ‘self’, the ‘ego’ but in reality it nurtures it through the paramis of renunciation (i.e. living like a monk) and tolerance. The first one augments narcissism since the participant can say ‘I lived 10 days like a monk and I resisted it. Therefore, I am so great’ and the second claims that ‘I am tolerant to your action, and you are an ignorant or you are sick. You are wrong, but I am right’. Lastly, if someone shares the experience, her/his ego is saying something like ‘I am so great because I am here suffering all these physical pains that will take me to a higher level. The people I know should be as great as I am, so, given the fact that I am so good and compassionate, I will tell others so they can go to a retreat and feel better thanks to me’.

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Back to the discourses, they are profoundly brainwashing. Each day at 7:30pm, after meditating throughout the whole afternoon and having eaten nothing after 11am the discourses time arrives. The mundane body is not used to these periods of mental activity that meditation entails and also without food, the brain becomes weak and accepts easier anything. The examples Goenka uses make the audience believe that is absolutely true when it is stupidly obvious what he says but does not provide appropriate reasons (unfortunately, I was weak myself and I cannot remember specifics). So far I highlighted, with vehemence I admit, the shortcomings of the experience. Now I will move to the positive aspects that I could find and that will include here with the same objectivity that I tried to include the deficiencies that I found. During the first days of meditation, one observes respiration entering either through the left nostril or the right nostril or through both nostrils at the same time. Goenka repeatedly encourages to observe ‘reality as it is’ and one should not try to change it. In the mundane world, most humans suffer with the reality that is not under their control, e.g. the weather. We must accept the difficulties external to us as they are: no more, no less, without victimizing nor ennobling ourselves. “It is what it is”! In life, there are three types of affairs: mine, theirs and external to all. The latter are the externalities exposed above. By maintaining ‘noble silence’ during ten consecutive days, you are forced to deal with your own affairs, without interfering with anybody else’s. I argue that in everyday life, we should pursue the same behaviour since we only can ‘control’ ourselves but we intend to change others and their behaviours when in reality we cannot judge their conduct since we do not know the causalities that led her/him to act in certain fashion. Given the fact that you are confronting yourself, and yourself only you begin to realize, and then Goenka confirms it, that ‘You have to fight your own battle’. I am the one who knows best my predicaments, crises and dilemmas and I can accurately affirm that they are not the same of the rest of individuals. The education process, the experiences, the context and the culture amid people are different, even if you compare yourself with your siblings. Therefore, it is within me where the battle takes place and it is only me who has to learn how to fight it. Also suggested by Goenka, one starts to recognize that ‘I only love myself’. It is difficult to accept although it may have to do with the system: “capitalist economy abandoned the individual completely to her/himself. What s/he did and how s/he did it, whether s/he was successful of not was her/his own business” (Fromm, 1947: 117). At the very end, at the very bottom you do not care about anyone else but yourself. We lack real benevolence, i.e. the individual’s welfare increases, or will increase, as s/he Gabriel Alba

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perceives an increase in the welfare of other. Once you accept this and realize this truth, you can transform such pattern and switch on to truly care about a few individuals. The physical benefits of the exercise are clear and maybe I am not mentioning all: eating healthy vegetarian food, following a schedule that provides enough rest at night, losing weight due to the less ingest of food, and strengthening the muscles of your back. Finally, on day twelve you can choose to donate or not, which demonstrates that the organization is not driven by profit (but it does not imply that it neglects capitalism). I acknowledge that I could write these pages because I completed two courses that i) left me a lot of benefits, which I enumerated and ii) led me to all these conclusions. I could not have possibly done it by reading a book nor by listening to anyone, it was my own experience. Hence, quoting John Locke, “no man’s knowledge can go beyond her/his experience.” To conclude, Vipassana, as any other religion, has a decent purpose; it stands for very laudable commandments. Nevertheless, they are precisely that: orders subtly imposed from outside that have to be obeyed. My intention is to let the reader see that such commands must arise from the Self spontaneously without the repression generated by the all-pervasive religion system. I will, finally, quote Goethe, the liberator – as named by Ortega y Gasset – in what I aim to instil: “now you do not have a received norm; now, you will have to give it to yourself” (quoted in Ortega y Gasset, 1966:259).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Fromm, E., 1947, “Fear of Freedom”, Paidós Ortega y Gasset, J., 1957, “¿What is Philosophy?”, Porrúa Ortega y Gasset, J., 1966, “Some Lessons in Metaphysics”, Porrúa Singh, H., 2007, “A Critique of Vipassana Meditation as thought by Mr S N Goenka” downloaded from the internet site http://harmanjit.googlepages.com/vipassana-critique.pdf last st accessed on April 1 , 2009 • http://www.dhamma.org/en/code.shtml last accessed on March 21st, 2009 • http://www.dhamma.org/en/os/osguide.htm last accessed on March 21st, 2009 • • • •

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