Caveat: Adhitthana

[This is a “back-post”;  it is a work-in-progress, so it may change partially or completely, with materials added or taken away, over the next several days or weeks.  This is “day 4(b)” of my stay at the Vipassana Meditation retreat.  For general comments and summary, see “day 11.”]

“Adhitthana” means “strong determination.”

Today, we have been told that we should be “sitting with strong determination,” which means sitting still:  not changing position, not changing posture, not opening up hands.

Why is this?  I understand it.  It’s discipline.  But it’s very difficult.  The first time I try it, I struggle so much with the pain and ache in my legs and back, that I’m not really doing any kind of meditation of any kind. Just sitting, with strong determination.

The second time goes better. I spend some time on anapana – observing the respiration on my upper lip. Observing.

Observing.

Pain in my legs, but not unbearable. Cross-legged, sitting.

There’s a kind of exhilaration when the hour finishes.  I feel accomplishment.  Not sure that’s the objective.  But by the end of the hour of sitting perfectly still, I also feel these weird spots of “non-sensation” in parts of my body:  mostly in the hands and arms.  It’s not numbness, but there’s nothing to feel, so it’s like a hole in the self-body-map.  All it takes is slight flexing of the muscles in the hand, and it feels perfectly normal.  So strange.

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Caveat: Foucault’s Fun Farm

[This is a “back-post”;  it is a work-in-progress, so it may change partially or completely, with materials added or taken away, over the next several days or weeks.  This is “day 4(a)” of my stay at the Vipassana Meditation retreat.  For general comments and summary, see “day 11.”]

It’s all about the discipline.

Michel Foucault is one of the most notable philosophers of the 20th century, and I would say his most influential work on me personally was his Archeology of Knowledge (which, incidentally, I read the first time in Spanish translation as Arqueologia del saber).  Nevertheless, perhaps one of his most widely-known works is Discipline and Punish, and within my imagination, Foucault’s name is synonymous, perhaps unfairly and certainly inaccurately, with certain notions of the weird give-and-take of our relationship, as individuals and more broadly as a civilization, with discipline, both external and internalized.

So I have coined the term “Foucault’s Fun Farm” for this entirely voluntary retreat that is so focused on concepts of discipline.  The disciplinary aspects include everything from the hours we keep to the food we eat, to the way we interact (or refuse to interact) with one another, to the way we sit and think (or not think). The fact of the matter is that I like it.

The same way that my favorite part of my military experience was the training — when discipline was maximal (and things seemed profoundly ethical and fair), and meaning was almost non-existent.  The same way that I can sometimes be nostalgic for a long stay at a hospital, where everything is structured and predictable.

Because one of the things I most lack in my life, is self-discipline.  Or…well… I feel that I lack it.  I’m better than I once was, really.  But I came here, ultimately, as much for the discipline as for the meditation, per se.  Certainly, I didn’t come for the Buddhist dogma.  That last is just a sort of adjunct, an annoyance… a gnat.

Beware dogmatic gnats. They’ll bite you.

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