I have just completed my fourth Vipassana
December 2018

Yesterday afternoon during my daily reporting with Prah Ajahn Suphon, the head monk at Wat Ram Poeng in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I was "released from "voluntary solitary confinement," my phrase for what the temple calls "in determination."   When I came for my third Vipassana this past January, I was told when I had completed my ten days by the nun who is head of the foreign office at the Wat that during my next visit, it is time for my "in determination" what she referred to as “graduation.”  There is an option for meditators to come for a 26 day stay and do their "in determination" at the end of their stay.  My stays have been ten days, fifteen days, ten days, and this time twelve days, consecutively.  Adding them all up, I have meditated at the temple on my first three Vipassanas  a total of 35 days and now 47 days total. So I added some days to this visit to prepare for it as she instructed, one needed at least 12 days, maybe more, because preparation for "in determination" was necessary and during the daily reports with the monk, he will decide when you are ready.  So five days ago, Prah Ajahn Suphan told me I would be going "in determination" after reporting the the next evening.  The next evening, he handed me a sign instructing me to hang it on my bedroom door, with the words:

IN DETERMINATION
PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB
THANK YOU

This morning as I type these words sitting on the balcony outside my guest house room overlooking the Ping River in Chiang Mai, I am feeling more refreshed and happy than I have ever been in my life.  I can not describe in words the feeling.  I feel I received a message from the universe this morning checking my email for the first time in two weeks, from one of my Krishnamurti daily messages.  I am not in the habit of reading these daily but happened to open this one which was sent nine days ago.

This message affirms my belief that this experience is too difficult to express in words the feelings which come from it.  And possibly it may take away from the benefits of the experience if I try too hard to explain it in words, especially that of being in complete solitude during "in determination" and meditating continually without sleep.  As always, when I am completing my Vipassana and it's challenges of hour after hour of meditating, especially wondering when the timer is going to go off during eventually a total hour of walking meditation, I wonder at those times why I put my self through this and think that I will never be back after this one.   I wanted to write these words this morning, especially for my own reminder that it is the feelings when you walk away from the experience which are the great benefit, those feelings of happiness and true clarity.  When I got back last night from the temple to the beautiful guest house where I stay every year, I was still having this feeling that I may never return to the Wat.  But after a total of at least eight hours of the most restful sleep I have ever had, except for being awakened one time with a severe cramp in my foot I had to walk off,  I awoke with great contentment and a pure joy of life.  The Ying Yang of life, it is like the conversation I will always remember I heard years ago between my then four year old nephew David and his four year old girlfriend, Lily.   They began a discussion on death in the back seat of my sister's car because we had just passed a graveyard. They agreed that death happens some time when you get very sick.  But some times you get sick because when you are sick, you feel better after you are sick than you felt before you are sick.  Is this not one of the reasons to put my self through this annual experience of a Vipassana?  Is it that after Vipassana, one experiences the every day life outside of the experience in a deeper way?


Quotes from J. Krishnamurti:

Effort is distraction from what is.
We must understand the problem of striving. If we can understand the significance of effort, then we can translate it into action in our daily life. Does not effort mean a struggle to change what is into what it is not, or what it should be, or what it should become? We are constantly escaping from what is, to transform or modify it. He who is truly content is he who understands what is, who gives the right significance to what is. True contentment lies not in few or many possessions, but in understanding the whole significance of what is. Only in passive awareness is the meaning of what is understood. I am not, at the moment, talking of the physical struggle with the earth, with construction or a technical problem, but of psychological striving. The psychological struggles and problems always overshadow the physiological. You may build a careful social structure, but as long as the psychological darkness and strife are not understood, they invariably overturn the carefully built structure.
Effort is distraction from what is. In the acceptance of what is, striving ceases. There is no acceptance when there is the desire to transform or modify what is. Striving, an indication of destruction, must exist so long as there is a desire to change what is.
The Book of Life, August 28, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995


The flash of understanding
I do not know if you have noticed that there is understanding when the mind is very quiet, even for a second; there is the flash of understanding when the verbalization of thought is not. Just experiment with it and you will see for yourself that you have the flash of understanding, that extraordinary rapidity of insight, when the mind is very still, when thought is absent, when the mind is not burdened with its own noise. So, the understanding of anything—
—of a modern picture, of a child, of your wife, of your neighbor, or the understanding of truth which is in all things—can only come when the mind is very still. But such stillness can not be cultivated because if you cultivate a still mind, it is not a still mind, it is a dead mind.
... The more you are interested in something, the more your intention to understand, the more simple, clear, free the mind is. Then verbalization ceases. After all, thought is word, and it is the word that interferes. It is the screen of words, which is memory, that intervenes between the challenge and the response. It is the word that is responding to the challenge, which we call intellection. So, the mind that is chattering, that is verbalizing, cannot understand truth—truth in relationship, not an abstract truth. There is no abstract truth. But truth is very subtle. It is the subtle that is difficult to follow. It is not abstract. It comes so swiftly, so darkly, it cannot be held by the mind. Like a thief in the night, it comes darkly, not when you are prepared to receive it.
The Book of Life, September 6, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

Free from the net of time
Without meditation, there is no self-knowledge; without self- knowledge, there is no meditation. So, you must begin to know what you are. You cannot go far without beginning near, without understanding your daily process of thought, feeling , and action. In other words, thought must understand its own working, and when you see yourself in operation, you will observe that thought moves from the known to the known. You cannot think about the unknown. That which you know is not real because what you know is only in time. To be free from the net of time is the important concern, not to think about the unknown, because you cannot think about the unknown. The answers to your prayers are of the known. To receive the unknown, the mind itself must become the unknown. The mind is the result of the thought process, the result of time, and this thought process must come to an end. The mind cannot think of that which is eternal, timeless; therefore, the mind must be free of time, the time process of the mind must be dissolved. Only when the mind is completely free from yesterday, and is therefore not using the present as a means to the future, is it capable of receiving the eternal. ... Therefore, our concern in meditation is to know oneself, not only superficially, but the whole content of the inner, hidden consciousness. Without knowing all that and being free of its conditioning, you cannot possibly go beyond the mind’s limits. That is why the thought process must cease, and for this cessation there must be knowledge of oneself. Therefore meditation is the beginning of wisdom, which is the understanding of one’s own mind and heart.
The Book of Life, December 22, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995


Meditation
I am going step by step into what is meditation. Please don’t wait till the end, hoping to have a complete description of how to meditate. What we are doing now is part of meditation.
Now, what one has to do is to be aware of the thinker, and not try to resolve the contradiction and bring about an integration between thought and the thinker. The thinker is the psychological entity who has accumulated experience as knowledge; he is the time-bound center that is the result of ever-changing environmental influence, and from this center he looks, he listens, he experiences. As long as one does not understand the structure and the anatomy of this center, there must always be conflict, and a mind in conflict cannot possibly understand the depth and the beauty of meditation.
In meditation there can be no thinker, which means that thought must come to an end—the thought which is urged forward by the desire to achieve a result. Meditation has nothing to do with achieving a result. It is not a matter of breathing in a particular way, or looking at your nose, or awakening the power to perform certain tricks, or any of the rest of that immature nonsense. ... Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried along by the wind—to be choicelessly aware of all that is part of meditation.
The Book of Life, December 23, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995


Aloneness is not loneliness
Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class—which again breeds isolation, loneliness. Now a mind that is caught in loneliness, in this state of isolation, can never possibly understand what religion is. It can believe, it can have certain theories, concepts, formulas, it can try to identify itself with that which it calls God; but religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness. Only when the mind is completely alone can it know what is beauty, and not in any other state.

Aloneness is obviously not isolation, and it is not uniqueness. To be unique is merely to be exceptional in some way, whereas to be completely alone demands extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence, understanding. To be completely alone implies that the mind is free of every kind of influence and is therefore uncontaminated by society; and it must be alone to understand what is religion—which is to find out for oneself whether there is something immortal, beyond time.

The Book of Life, December 2, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995