There is a great book. You’ve got to read it. It is called “The Complete Guide to World Mysticism” by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

Well, at least the first two chapters are great. The rest of the book? Kind of dull. Each of the remaining chapters focuses on a particular brand of mysticism (i.e. Christian mysticism, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, etc). Those chapters are kind of interesting, but if you’re new to mysticism (as I was when I read the book), the first two chapters are the real paradigm-shifters.

A quote:

“There is a Hindu teaching story about a toad who lived in a well, who was one day visited by a toad who lived in the sea.  “How big is your well?” asked the first toad, “Is it as vast as mine?”.  The (sea) toad smiled and tried to explain, “My well is so huge that it has no edges.  It contains so much water that it could never run dry in a million hot summers.  It is so deep that perhaps it has no bottom.”  The (well) toad looked incredulous, “Your are either boasting or your imagination has run away with itself!” he complained.  “Come with me,” said the sea toad, “and I will show you.”

…and that’s what mysticism is all about – knowing the truth through DIRECT EXPERIENCE.

On his website, Timothy Freke does seem to be a bit of a “freak” (with an oversized ego, judging by the oversized pictures of himself flashing all over the place) which detracts from his credibility in my opinion, but it’s still a great book (the first two chapters, that is).  (On a related note, spiritual author Ken Wilber’s website gives him the appearance of an attention-hungry ego fanatic too.  Kind of disconcerting, although his books are great also)

You can find the book on Amazon HERE, but unforutunately it’s out of stock, and looks like it will be for a while.

Do you know what mysticism is? Didn’t think so. Most people who I ask don’t know what it is. I didn’t know either until recently.

Wikipedia says that mysticism is “the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the Other, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight.”

I think I can shorten that to read “the pursuit of achieving awareness of spiritual truth though direct experience.”

It is the “direct experience” aspect that is critical. I’m sure you’ll agree that knowing the truth about something through direct experience is more effective than knowing the truth by trying to figure it out intellectually, or simply by being told by someone else that something is true.

Yet most religious people accept the “truths” of their religion simply because they are told by others that the “truths” are true, or because it is part of their culture, and they go through intellectual irrationalization necessary to convince themselves of the “truths” as I have mentioned before. Insanity.

Down with Intellect!

Down with Blind Acceptance!

Long live Direct Experience!

Of course, intellect and trusting what other people say are both important, but only “work” for some sorts of things. I read somewhere that Buddha warned against intellectualizing about things that can’t be figured out that way. Wise words, in my opinion.

It was the following section of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now that hit me the hardest.  Love it!  It’s taken out of context here so I hope you don’t have too hard a time jumping in:

Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.

As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.

Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” – and find that there is no death.

Crazy or what?

If you enjoyed that excerpt, check out a few other quotes from The Power of Now.   Or even better read the whole book.

I’ve realized that it may be almost hopeless to have a discussion with any strong Catholic on whether priests should be celibate without first looking at the “bigger picture”. Let me explain…

The reason I think it is almost hopeless is that if a Catholic agrees that the celibacy requirement is wrong, they are actually agreeing for FAR more than just that. If the Catholic Church (CC) is wrong about just this one thing, then that would mean that the CC is not the infallible, God-controlled entity that they had always assumed it was; it would mean not just that the celibacy requirement is wrong, but that their entire religion is actually not “the one”. What a huge admission, especially if their whole life and identity are built up around being Catholic.

In other words, by conceding that the CC is (or may be) wrong about the celibacy issue, they would be opening up ALL the teachings of CC for questioning (real questioning; not just self-deceptive rationalization). Basically, if a Catholic is actually open to the possibility that the celibacy requirement might be wrong, they are saying “I’m not sure about the rightness of Catholicism anymore.” Therefore they have to keep their truly-objectively-thinking minds completely shut down.

I think that unfortunately when someone joins a particular religion, they usually close their eyes to everything else and shut down their ability to think objectively. They don’t think they’ve lost their ability to think objectively; they think they’re still doing it; but really they’re just going through whatever thought processes it takes to convince themselves that everything else about their chosen religion is right. They’ll start rationalizing the most ludicrous things into validity. I’ve seen this type of irrational rationalizing from people of all different religions.

Some religions do have far more ludicrosity than Catholicism in my opinion, although I think Catholicism has its share also (examples are outside the scope of this post).

I think that when considering religious issues, religious people usually do not start from the perspective of “Here is an idea. Let’s see if we can figure out if it is true / sensible.” Instead, they start from the perspective of “Here is an idea. Our religion says it is true, and therefore it is true. Let’s see if we can figure out how we can come to understand / explain that this is true.”

Well, that about summarizes it. I hope you get the idea.

Disclaimer #1: I don’t actually think that Catholicism is bad overall. In fact, I think that if more people were strongly Catholic the world would probably be a much better place, because I think most of what the CC teaches is good stuff, and not harmful. But when it comes to the teachings that I think ARE harmful, I think that speaking up is important.

Disclaimer #2: I think that my own mind is also probably very closed in many ways for various reasons, and I’m sure I am far from perfect when it comes to objective thinking myself, although like everyone I like to think that I succeed once in a while.

I welcome any comments below…

…SOME THOUGHTS ON SACRIFICE (Specifically Celibacy):

I think that celibacy for life is an extreme sacrifice. I think that there are things that are worthy of extreme sacrifices, and therefore extreme sacrifices can be very good and noble things to do. But…

I think that an extreme sacrifice is not worthwhile unless it results in an extreme benefit. On a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being modest (non-extreme) and 10 being extreme, a level 10 sacrifice should result in a level 10 benefit. For example, it would be a noble act to jump in front of a bullet to prevent the bullet from killing someone else. But it would be a bad idea to jump in front of a bullet to prevent a broken window.

One probably obvious stipulation is that not only must an extreme benefit exist, but in order for the sacrifice to be worthwhile, the benefit must actually be the result (very preferably the DIRECT and quantifiable result) of the sacrifice. For example, curing everyone in Africa of AIDS might qualify as a level 10 benefit, but that doesn’t mean I should try to jump in front of a random bullet, because jumping in front of a bullet has no bearing on whether the Africans get cured of aids.

In the case of priests, I can’t see any equally extreme benefit resulting from their celibacy. Can you?

That last post ended on a negative note, so I’ll try to throw in a few more positive aspects here…

I did learn the value of equanimity and living in the present moment. For example, I experienced the fact that a significant amount of suffering comes from resisting the present moment and feeling aversion to it – for the first few days, when I experienced pain in my legs/back from sitting for so long, I would be constantly wishing it would go away, always wondering when the meditation session would be over. And since it wouldn’t go away, and the session wasn’t over, it caused me a lot of mental anguish. After learning about equanimity, I would do my best to simply observe the pain objectively, without feeling aversion, just accepting it as it was in the present, and not thinking about that past or future, and even analyzing the pain with my mind to see exactly how it felt in different areas, what type of pain, at what point in my body it began fading away, etc – just doing as much as possible to accept it – and I found that that made it much more tolerable. The pain was still there, but my suffering was reduced.

Living in the present moment is easier said than done though, and when the pain got bad enough I couldn’t do it any more, but I did experience the value of being able to do so at least somewhat.

Buddhists say that craving and aversion are the cause of suffering, and they are also contrary to living in the present moment – for example craving is wishing for something in the future instead of accepting the present moment as it is. Somehow this doesn’t mean that you can’t set goals for the future etc – I don’t quite get how that all fits together.

It also takes determination and persistence to complete the retreat – it is not a walk in the park – so I suppose I built up some of those qualities in myself also.

I also gained some sort of control over my mind, so that is a benefit also.

CONCLUSION:

So yes, I did benefit from the retreat, but I feel like they were all minimal improvements – I don’t feel like I actually eliminated any Sankharas and purified my mind or improved myself in any significant way which was the main point.

The “old students” (who had done these retreats before, and many of whom had been doing vipassana for years) for the most part did not seem particularly impressive to me – generally not the type of people I want to become like from what I could tell.

I’m glad I went, because it was an interesting experience and there were many great aspects to the retreat, but since the ultimate goal (improving myself in some way) was not achieved, I was, overall, disappointed because I got very little out of it.

Do I recommend it? Yes, IF you have 10 days to blow with nothing better to do, and IF you have read this entire review and have a realistic idea what to expect.

There is a lot more elaboration possible, but I’ll wait to expand until I get questions about specific things.

I welcome your comments and questions. Please type them in below!

I most definitely did experience a lot of sensations throughout my body that I would not otherwise feel, from pain to tingling to pulsing to hot and cold spots to “uniform subtle vibrations” etc, and I worked hard and did my best to remain focused and equanimous the whole time. The sensations arose and passed away, and everything always does (among many other things, they constantly stress the “law of impermanence” – everything always changes and nothing is permanent, so it is pointless to ever get attached to anything).

INTERESTING BUT NOT REALLY RELEVANT:

I had a hard time getting to sleep at night, because I could not turn the sensations off, and they were very distracting and kept me up.

They say that what the sensations are that you are experiencing are irrelevant. What matters is that you simply remain aware of them and equanimous to them. Most of the sensations I experience were the mundane types of sensations I described above. I did however have a couple unusual sensations. One was the sensation of tears running down my face. The tears felt 100% real, and the when they first started I wiped my face but found that there actually were no tears. No sadness or other emotions were attached to them – I only felt the physical sensations and that’s all. For a few of the meditation sessions, I had “tears” streaming down my face for the full hour. Other times, I felt like I had a big gash in the middle of my forehead, and there were drops coming from it (blood?) and running down my nose.  I often still felt the tears & gash during the week after the retreat ended (when I was not meditating); after that the sensations faded away.  Very interesting, but as they say, meaningless, because the point is to just remain aware and equanimous as the various sensations arise and pass away.

THE POSITIVES:

• It was run VERY well – it could not possibly have been run any more smoothly.
• The food was excellent.
• The accommodations were quite nice.
• Most of the discourses (videos) in the evening were excellent.
• The retreats are free, and are financed exclusively by donations. They do not allow you to donate any money until after you have completed a retreat, and even then they do not put any pressure on you to give them anything.
• I’m quite sure that the primary motivation of everyone running the retreat was love and compassion for others (which of course indirectly benefits themselves also) – to have exclusively volunteers putting in so much time and effort running such a smooth worldwide operation was very impressive. This, along with their apparent desire just to help others, is what impressed me the most of all.

THE NEGATIVES:

• Although they say all over their website that they are not a religious organization and are not sectarian, and they repeat the same thing a few times during the retreat, the fact is that they really actually are quite Buddhist. Half way through I seriously considered leaving for that reason (and also because of the constant very strange chanting of the teacher in a strange language – “Is he invoking evil spirits?” “Is he subliminally messing with my mind”?). Upon my insistence, they bent the rules and let me read a translation of the chanting, so I decided to stay. There were many other religious aspects that troubled me also.
• I think there may have been a bit of mild brainwashing going on, but I made sure to always keep “one eye open” and I don’t think I was affected. If you are going to do a retreat I encourage you to be aware of this.

THE MAJOR NEGATIVE:

For me, the major negative was simply that I did not get any apparent results from the retreat. I feel the same as I did before the retreat, and I seem to act/react/think the same as before also in all the situations of my life. Therefore, unfortunately, I cannot say that the retreat was successful. Essentially, I am the same, and therefore I am disappointed.

In one of the discourses, the teacher (S.N. Goenka) explains that there are 3 ways to know that something is true. The first is that someone tells you that something is true (this is the least effective way). The second is that you figure out the truth yourself intellectually (this is the second most effective way). The third is that you directly experience something yourself and therefore know that it is true (this is the most effective way). I agree with that 100%.

Goenka constantly tells you not to accept something because someone else says so, including himself, but rather to believe things only if you experience them to be true, and he also constantly points out that by doing Vipassana Meditation, you are experiencing reality directly within the framework of your own body. This is true. But there is a big missing piece to the puzzle…

I have no direct experience that the fundamental underlying concept of the meditation is true: How do I know that the sensations I’m experiencing are Sankharas coming to the surface, and how do I know that I am eradicating them through this type of meditation? The only way I “know” this is true is because the teacher said so.

I suppose that this is why Goenka constantly tells us that the sensations are our Sankharas that are getting eradicated (we have no other way to know it), but he does not tell us that we are experiencing the sensations in our body (he doesn’t need to tell us that, because are directly experiencing them)

I pointed this out to one of the Assistant Teachers, who said that I’d experience the truth of the theory in my life afterwards – I would be and act and feel differently. Well, that is not measurable and therefore seems kind of like a “fuzzy” answer to me, and since I actually am not (as far as I can tell) any different now that the retreat is over… my experience actually tells me that the theory is incorrect.

Coming Next: A few more positives, and conclusion.

2 months ago I did a 10-day meditation retreat, put on the by Dhamma.org organization (they have centers all over the world, including one a few hours from me). I’m going to split this review up into a few posts, since there is a lot to say.

They teach a specific type of meditation called “Vipassana Meditation”. First I’ll explain what the whole thing was like, and then let you know my opinions on it.

THE RULES:

There a few strict rules that you have to follow during the retreat:

• “Noble Silence” for the entire 10 days – no communication of any kind, including verbal communication, non-verbal communication (gestures), physical contact, or eye contact. There are 2 times each day when you can ask an assistant teacher questions if necessary, but otherwise the entire retreat is completely void of communication. Since I was a bit late on the first day, I didn’t get to meet the other students ahead of time, and had no idea what anyone else looked like until the last day when we were allowed to talk again.
• Complete celibacy (no sexual activity of any kind)
• Can’t kill any animal (including insects like mosquitos)
• Can’t lie (not too hard since you can’t talk)
• Can’t have any intoxicants (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, etc)
• Can’t have any reading or writing material
• No physical exercise
• No music
• …and a few others

All the rules are to facilitate meditation, minimize distractions, and allow people to get as deep as possible with their introspection.

THE CONTENT OF THE RETREAT (What Happens):

You can read more about what you actually do on their website (dhamma.org). Basically each day there are 10 hours of meditation, and along with eating meals, showering, the evening “discourse” (a video of the teacher (S.N. Goenka) teaching about the meditation and his philosophies on life), and a couple breaks, the day is full. A side note on food: You only get breakfast and lunch, and then fruit and tea for dinner – but surprisingly it is enough, I suppose because the physical activity is so minimal).

The first 2 days you do nothing during meditation but concentrate on your breath. This is to relax and focus your mind and get yourself in tune with your body – you also discover how out of control you mind actually is, but you get better at focusing and controlling it. For the next 1.5 days you focus on the sensations in a certain part of your face – surprisingly, you start to feel a lot of sensations going on, since you’re so focused and in tune with yourself. The sensations are actually always there, but usually you just can’t feel them. Then for the rest of the retreat you take your now somewhat tamed and focused mind and focus it part by part throughout the rest of your body, with tweaks each day on how you do that.

THE THEORY:

The main purpose of Vipassana Meditation is to undo your “conditioning”, and free yourself of all the things in your subconscious mind that are controlling the way you are, so that you can become your real unconditioned self. This is somewhat related to the Buddhist idea of enlightenment (you don’t get all the way there, or even close, during the 10 days, but apparently you make progress in that direction). They say that at your core, underneath all the conditioning, you’ll find only goodness, love, compassion, etc.

They say that your body and mind are very closely related, and the effects of everything that happens to you are stored in your body as some sort of tension, or some sensation, or something. For example, say you experience a painful rejection by an audience while doing an oral presentation when you are young. The effect of the rejection would be stored in your body somehow. From then on that affects you, and you feel nervous doing presentations. These stored conditionings than constantly affect you are called “Sankharas” (you learn a lot of new words, such as that one).

When you are meditating, and relaxed and in tune with your body, and equanimous (indifferent, just observing yourself objectively, feeling neither craving nor aversion to anything), the Sankharas start coming up to the surface. The idea is that when you just observe the physical manifestations of the Sankharas with equanimity, and they arise and pass away, the Sankharas get eradicated, along with their effects on you. (Before going on the retreat, I though that this meant I would start feeling various emotions, or having memories come into my mind, etc, but actually you only feel physical sensations).

You continue doing this until you are free of all your conditioning (takes a lot more than 10 days – it could take many lifetimes – but 10 days is supposed to be a good first step).

On the retreat you do cultivate some other good skills and attributes, such as equanimity, etc, but really the goal is to undo your conditioning.

Next… A bit about MY experience.