Vipassana

Whether the connotation is negative or positive, the common impression of meditation is that it is a withdrawal from the world.

Of course there are techniques that function in this way.

But meditation need not be an escape.

It can also be a means to encounter the world in order to understand it and ourselves.

Vipassana is one such, possibly the only such.

Every human being is conditioned to assume that the real world is outside.

That the way to live life is by contact with an external reality.

By seaking input, physical and mental from without.

Most of us have never considered severing outward contacts in order to see what happens inside.

The idea of doing so probably sounds like choosing to spend hours staring at the test pattern on a television screen.

We would rather explore the far side of the moon or the bottom of the ocean than the hidden depths within ourselves.

But in fact the universe exists for each of us only when we experience it with body and mind.

It is never elsewhere.

It is always here and now.

By exploring the here and now of ourselves we can explore the world.

Unless we investigate the world within we can never know reality.

We will only know our beliefs about it, or our intellectual conceptions of it.

By observing ourselves, however we can come to know reality directly and can learn to deal with it in a postive creative way.

This is why people study vipassana.

And you?

S.N.Goenkha/W.Hart