Truth Serum April 6, 2009
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Philosophy,Psychology , trackbackMy guide had boiled the kettle in the embers of the fire. When he thought it was ready, he scooped it up grabbing hold of the handle with his hand covered over with a rag and poured tea for two into large mugs. A tea ceremony this was not! We were in the bush and the night sky was as clear as crystal.
“If you think about it,” he said, following on from our conversation interrupted by duties of one kind or another, “the cause of suffering is the generation of negativity and when this happens we are bound to become unhappy. Put it this way, negativity cannot coexist with peace and harmony.”
“How do we generate negativity?” I asked him.
“We become unhappy when we find someone behaving in a way that we don’t like, or when we find something happening which we don’t like. Unwanted things happen and this creates tension within. And then while this is happening, desired things do not happen… some obstacle gets in the way to prevent it happening… and again, this creates tension within. The days, weeks, months and years fly past. Unwanted things keep on happening, and desired things don’t happen. We become so tense, so full of negativity, that life becomes miserable.”
He was right. In that moment, I made peace with the fact that our judgments of people and things are the primary catalyst for unhappiness.
“How do we put an end to it then?” I asked him genuinely.
“The wisdom keepers, that is to say, the saints and sages of the ancient world, studied this problem at great length… as I’m sure you can appreciate. They discovered that you have to face the problem. Whenever negativity arises in the mind, you must observe it, face it directly, and don’t ever run away from it. And as soon as the negativity is observed as it is, the mental impurities begin to lose their power and they slowly evaporate.”
“But how?” I asked, not without a trace of frustration.
“Mental purification is the removal of reactions that make people feel unhappy,” he explained to me. “Reactions are always external, aren’t they?
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Think about it,” he urged.
“Aren’t anger, passion, fear, depression, anxiety, and so on, just reactions to what is going on outside? So with training and practice, it is very easy to observe your respiration and your bodily sensations, both of which are directly related to mental defilements. As soon as negativity arises in the mind, the breath will lose its normality… it will start shouting… ‘Look here… something has gone wrong!’ And of course, we cannot reprimand the breath, can we? We can only accept the warning.”
He had a point. In other words, who is the entity outside of the breath making the judgment?
“Sensations also tell us something is wrong,” he commented.
“Having been warned then about the breath, about these sensations, we can observe both our respirations and our corresponding sensations. Sooner or later, we discover that the negativity vanishes.”
“But how?” the apprentice that was ‘me’ asked.
My guide could see that I was clearly unsettled and still somewhat confused. He took a deep breath and continued – seeing the need for much explanation.
“The soma-psyche phenomenon is like a coin with two sides,” he insisted.
“On one side of the coin are the thoughts and emotions arising in the mind. On the other side of the coin are our respirations and sensations in the body. Any thoughts and emotions… or any mental impurities that may arise… manifest in the breath and our sensations of that moment. By observing these respirations or these sensations, we are in fact observing mental impurities. Instead of running away from them… we are actually facing reality as it is. We then discover… that these impurities lose their strength… and they no longer overpower us as they once did. If we persist, these impurities disappear altogether and we may begin to live peacefully and happily… free from negativities.”
I tried it on for size. I revisited the incident. I could see it in my mind’s eye and immediately felt uncomfortable as the breath became unsettled. I watched the breath carefully though and as I did so, the sensations began to dissipate. In a minute or two, I felt nothing but calm. The breath was now steady.
“It works doesn’t it?” my guide asked, as he watched me practice.
“This technique of self-observation is called vipassana… to see things as they really are… it is one of India’s greatest exports,” he told him emphatically.
“It is a way of self-transformation through self-observation. Another word for it is insight meditation. It was discovered or rediscovered by Gautama Buddha more than 2,500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills.”
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