Back to the Practice

I will be starting a set of Insight Meditation classes (Vipassana). They are hosted by audiodharma.org – currently the site is down for maintenence but I will post a link to it once it is back up again.
For now, I will just post some info about Vipassana from other sites. From Wikipedia:

Vipassanā (Pāli) or vipaśyanā (विपश्यना, Sanskrit) in the Buddhist tradition means insight into the nature of reality. In the Theravadin context, this entails insight into the three marks of existence. In Mahayana contexts, it entails insight into what is variously described as sunyata, dharmata, the inseparability of appearance and emptiness, clarity and emptiness, or bliss and emptiness.[1] Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation, attributed to Gautama Buddha. It is a way of self-transformation through self-observation and introspection. In English, vipassanā meditation is often referred to simply as “insight meditation”.

I’m pretty excited about it. I have trained under Rinzai Zen (Mahayana Buddhism) meditation, and found it incredibly fulfilling. Sadly I sort of fell away from it all when I went back to virtual worlds again in 2006. My fault: I own it completely. Rinzai and Vipassana have some things in common, most especially the concentration on seeing things as they are, rather than how we’d like them to be.

Which brings to mind a verse of the Diamond Sutra that always stays with me, when I try to explain what I mean by “as they are”.

“So I say to you -
This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:”

“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

The parallels to Greek philosophy are notable – most particularly Heraclitus, the riddle of Parmenides, the later development of Atomism through Democritus, and lastly the Canon oft repeated by Lucretius and explained by Philodemus -  and probably this parallel that reaches straight into the Epicurean logic, is the strongest reason I am so in love with this verse from the Mahayana tradition. But I will come to that in another blog post. The synopsis is: the viewing of everything in this world as processes: that come to be and go away – the issue of change, not always as they may seem from general appearances, and the tendency not to perceive awareness and the things that come across that perception through the dimensionality of time and space.

A tendency to view everything as static, yet nothing ever stays the same.

I know of Vipassana through others I have met in my Zen meditation and yoga classes, and I am very excited about starting the practice of meditation again. This time I will not fall away: my only resolution this year.

Nothing like today to start a new page. Just coincidental that it happens to be the start of a new year.

*thanks her particular friend, and smiles*