There is something to be said about books presenting a "basic method of meditation" such Ajahn Brahm's "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond". Such books are part of marketing ploy to sell retreats organized by religious institutions (which serve ultimately as recruiting grounds for new monks and nuns). As such the methods described - which may have unquestionable value - are only suited to the specific conditions of the retreat. Such conditions are inaccessible to the vast majority of us. This includes those who have the luck of having access to the seclusion and peace of nature for some limited amount of time, but certainly not for weeks - the time needed for such methods to be effective. These methods count on philosophical insight about consciousness manifesting on its own during the long periods of seclusion and silence, or they count on the guidance of a teacher. These methods in themselves fall under the category of "samatha" rather than "vipassana", even if there are also "vipassana" -themed retreats.
We note that Ajahn Brahm himself probably became aware of the Herculean task of detaching oneself from the world (abandoning past and future to abide in the eternal present) and so introduced an alternative method which amounts to calming the body and mind through body-scanning, a sweeping focus built on psycho-somatic feedback (this method can also be traced to the earliest suttas). Rather than trying to tear the stubborn agitated child from his toys or tearing the toys from the child one engages in calming and lulling the child to sleep. What is involved here is a doctrine concerning the fundamental importance of the first-person experience of the body and concerning the fundamental unity and cyclic dependency between this first-person experience of the body and all aspects of consciousness. The first-person experience of the body involves localized 'feeling' and the cultivation of consciousness of such feeling can open up vast domains of very subtle and significant experience. The doctrine is that such domains of subtle feeling in first-person body experience are the key to total mastery of all domains of consciousness (cf. how the flux of consciousness is woven with sense impressions and sense impressions are intimately psycho-somatically related to sense organs, receptors and their neural pathways). The doctrine appears to be present in a more-or-less veiled way for instance in the sutta MN 119. We can think of the psycho-somatic feedback as creating a kind of field, container (cf. the simile of the soap and bath in MN 119) in which the rest of consciousness is then immersed to become pacified and purified (cf. again the similes in MN 119). One can say that the initial process of both local and global psycho-somatic feedback prepares a thoroughly purified and pacified 'container', 'field' or 'body' (there are many meanings of khaya in the suttas). Once this is thoroughly achieved then piti and sukha will 'dawn' and 'well up'. We then interpret the similes in MN 119 as involving the further purification, 'drenching', 'irrigation' and total 'covering' of this 'container-field-body' with piti and sukha. There are interesting connections that could be made with Plotinus as well.
Hence the necessity of a "method of meditation" which is still powerful and effective in the context of ordinary life in the world. Such a method must be based - alongside the considerations above - on introspective-philosophical psychology founded on phenomenological insight. A method of philosophical psychological analysis, introspection and insight which aims at liberation from both the "world" and the "self" whose starting point is the positivist neutral consideration of consciousness, the facts of consciousness, as they are in themselves, as manifest in their manifestation, without the screen of metaphysical reification or the habitual oblivion of their fundamental co-conditioning factors such as temporality or the underlying mental directedness in recollection and anticipation. A powerful tool for this method is hearing or reading the original suttas of the Pali Canon or foundational philosophical texts of the Mahâyâna tradition. It is in this spirit that much of what we have written should be read.
Another point concerns the difference between Western and Eastern art. It does seem to us indeed that in some schools and works of Eastern Art (specially traditional Japanese art inspired by Zen) have a very strong connection to the pure neutral phenomenological-philosophical insight discussed above. In some sense, there are schools of Eastern Art which manifest anatta and the holistic flux of a neutral phenomenological consciousness (for instance the traditional Shakuhachi) which is rarely found in classical Western art (but we do find such for instance in more contemporary compositions such as Brian Eno or the Polish ambient band How to Disappear Completely).
No comments:
Post a Comment