[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.
