Vipassana – A sensational experience!

Have been wanting/ debating to write about this for some time now. Finally decided to pen it.

I underwent the 10-day Vipassana course, as taught by Shri S N Goenka in December 2016, in the holy town of Thiruvannamalai. Some 100,000+ people participate in their meditation courses each year all over the world, so I don’t need to mention about how well it was organized or how well thought through each and every aspect of the practice and attendant paraphernalia was. The fact that these programs are run by volunteers with very few permanent staff and on a voluntary contribution basis is a testimony to its appeal and a lesson on how to create sustainable organizational models

Now to the experience itself. While we were taught the technique (preparatory and the eventual one) of Vipassana, which is essentially about observing the sensations in your body, the instructions mentioned that our mind will run either into the past or onto the future and over a period of time, we will observe a pattern as to where it gets directed to. In my case, while there were no specific events or images or thoughts that kept recurring, there was an underlying driver to what was occurring in my consciousness. Whether I was imagining something in the future or reliving my past, it occurred to me that my thoughts and indeed my actions, nay my life itself, is driven by what I call a constructed image of myself. Yes, deep in me I have built a certain idea/ concept / image of myself. I don’t know how this came to be but I know for sure that it is. Ironically, when I tried to define it, give a shape to it, visualize it, I just could not. The whole image was fleeting, ephemeral without definable attributes. Then I wondered if this is what is called “Maya”, illusion. As much as I understand advaitic philosophy, it does not consider the world an illusion, contrary to what many people think. Instead it considers the thought or idea that we are separate from the world around us is an illusion. This separation in turn is due to the identity we develop about ourselves, the image I came to discover.

Vipassana was a great experience and it made me realize I am not living my life, instead I am living my imagination. Wake up!