Pressing the “Off” Button

In staying true to the theme of this blog, I try to limit my entries to things related to the experience of writing. On rare occasion however, there are experiences that while outside the category of writing, are so significant that they deserve to be included here. My most recent blog entry (emphasis on recent) concluded with the list of questions I collected after considering the various “levels” to our thought processes. Most importantly was my open-ended musing as to whether or not there’s a way to intentionally impact the way we think.

In my own effort to explore the potential answers to that question, I’m going to attend a ten-day meditation retreat. For anyone that’s interested in all the nitty-gritty details, you can review the web site, but I’ll give you the condensed version. This retreat is all about Vipassana meditation and only about Vipassana meditation. The regimented daily schedule consists of over 10 hours of meditating, with the first session starting at 4:30am every morning. No contact with the outside world is allowed, the food is all vegetarian and just in case that doesn’t sound “hard core” enough, there’s essentially no talking by participants for the first nine days of the experience.

So how does this relate to affecting the way we think? To understand that, I’ll probably need to share an analogy that I use for what meditation represents. I like to imagine our thoughts and mind as a mental food processor. Our “mind” is represented by the whirling blade, always slicing and re-slicing anything that comes in contact with it. The problems start when we drop anything sticky in there, after which no matter how many times it gets knifed, it ends up stuck to the sides. Then at any time in the future, especially when triggered by some external event that reactivates a negative memory, that sticky mess can fall back onto the blade and consume more of our mental focus. This analogy is great because we’re simply rehashing the same material over and over again.

One theory on how to clean out the inside of our mental food processor is to stop tossing new items in and focus on what drops in from the sides of our memory banks. If we completely process the material, whether by intensely examining it, unraveling it or just plain observing it, there’s the potential to move past it. This is important because that “sticky stuff” has been building up since we were old enough to form memories, which some will claim is even before we were born. When viewed in this light, the idea of doing nothing but meditating and not even interacting with others, we can see how the intent is to engage in a form of mental deprivation. The intent of this exercise is to stop tossing things into the food processor and give it the opportunity to clean itself out. That spinning blade just won’t stop spinning, so it will find its way to anything it can get itself into. Without new material it will start working its way backwards through whatever it can dig up. Given enough time, all the sticky memories can find their way “out.”

And then what? Well, that’s the big question. Is it like pressing the off button on the food processor and finally feeling the constant process of thinking come to rest while we’re still conscious? Or with nothing of interest to hold our attention, does our thinking become something that is easier to ignore and raise our focus to a level essentially above thinking? Would it be more like our hearing then, where even though we always hear the sounds around us we can effectively tune them out when we focus on something else? There are various schools of thought on this, none of which I can fully subscribe to until I’ve had the first hand experience myself.

I mentioned that the “code of silence” observed during the course is only for the first nine days. It is lifted on the final day to allow for everyone to start reintegrating normal social habits. My close friend (who doesn’t often frequent this blog) warned me, “Dude, if you come back wearing a toga, I’m not going to hang out with you!” I’ll only give you one guess at what I intend to wear the next time I show up at his house… if only for a good laugh!

Be well, and I’ll try to share my experience as soon as I return (there’s not even any writing or journaling allowed while I’m there!)

Brian