Reflections of a Concentration Retreat

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I’m back from the Therevada retreat. I had a really interesting time. I saw a very tumultous mind. I am (as you might suspect) a very wordy person - quite attached to conversation. I don’t (it turns out), really like having a lot of quietness in my mind. I get very agitated. On this retreat I think I spent 10 days without speaking. Well, I did cheat a little, because my friend Trav/s was there. We would go on hikes and I really enjoyed the distraction because really a lot of psychological stuff came up. In such a situation as maintaining silence, the silence becomes a mirror to your own mind working, chugging along, generating thought after thought. You actually get to a point where you see the process. Since I had very few distractions or outlets for this I had to, as they say, ‘just sit with it’ and watch it spin up.

I learned a lot about how the mind works, about how when we hear something, or see something, or touch something, it can bring up old memories that color the current situation. Now that sounds like psychobabble, but it is actually true. If you sit with yourself alone with no distractions you will see that. Everything that our senses come into contact with brings an initial feeling - either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Everything is like that. The neutral stuff we ignore, we filter that out, which is helpful, because otherwise we would probably be overwhelmed. It’s like how the peripheral vision is there but you don’t pay attention to it. You generally pay attention to what is right in front of your nose, so to speak. Then there is the pleasant and the unpleasant reaction - and this stuff is happening in the ancient brain - the Pali word for this is ‘vedena’. You can recognize it by touching a hot stove, ‘Ouch!’ That’s unpleasant vedena. A cool breeze on a hot day is a pleasant vedena. This is really about survival, any living thing has this to some degree. We go towards what is pleasant and avoid what is unpleasant. So right after the sense contact, soon after that, there is vedena and that vedena generally sets up a big chain reaction of thoughts - memories or ideas. You know the feeling. Someone cuts you off in traffic on the way to work and that is the beginning of a bad day. Sometimes it works like that. With a long time in silence you see this working. Well, you might, anyway. I didn’t usually catch the actual vedena. Instead, I noticed after I was caught up in the pattern of thinking, generally negative. Once I saw that mind state I could trace it back to the source - some general thought or sense contact I had made. And at the beginning of the chain, waiting for me was indeed, ‘grasping’. Wanting pleasant things or wanting to avoid unpleasant things. The pattern all starts there. If the mind is quiet, however, when you touch something hot just, ‘ouch!’. No chain reaction.

I’m not going to get into it too much, there’s plenty of resources on the web. If you study Buddhism at all, you know what I am talking about. The point is that it is all process. It does not come from some solid personality, it is not due to ‘me’. I only establish that idea of ‘me’ based on the patterns of reactions to the vedena; to initial feelings. And based on that idea of ‘me’ I maintain the patterns - they feed each other. If you look into things you see it going on this way.

This is very ‘Basic Buddhism’, but it is not really basic at all, it is very profound. We are not objects, solid things existing out there, separate from the other objects. We are a process, a verb. We are ‘personing’, but we are not really persons. ‘Persons’ is a made up name applied to this process. Sitting silently with yourself hour after hour, you can see this happening.

But who is it that is sitting silently?

Tashi Delek, everyone!