Vipassana and Shakespeare: East meets West?

[randall patrick]

From Irvin D Yalom's novel, The Schopenhauer Cure:


"Goenka began the teaching of Vipasanna. The technique is simple and straightforward. Students are instructed to meditate on their scalp until a sensation occurs----an itch, a tingling, a burning, perhaps the feeling of a tiny breeze upon the skin of the scalp. Once the sensation is identified, the student is simply to observe, nothing more. Focus on the itch. What is it like? Where does it go? How long does it last? When it disappears [as it always does], the meditator is to move to the next segment of the body, the face, and survey for stimuli like a nostril tickle or an eyelid itch. After these stimuli grow, ebb and disappear, the student proceeds to the neck, the shoulders, until every part of the body is observed right down to the soles of the feet....


"Goenka's evening discourses provided the rationale for the technique. The key concept is anitya----impermanence. If one fully appreciates the impermanence of each physical stimulus, it is but a short step to extrapolate the principle of anitya to all of life's events and unpleasantries; everything will pass, and one will experience equanimity if one can maintain the observers stance and simply watch the passing show."


And:


"Yet now that she had cleansed her mind, why was she not elated? On the contrary, a shadow fell upon her success. Something about her enjoyment of 'sweeping' darkened her thoughts....

"Now she understond the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana. Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity, tranquility, or, as he often put it, equipose. But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken up Vipassana would Lear or Hamlet have been born? Would any of the masterpieces in Western culture have been written? One of Chapman's couplets drifted into mind:

'No pen can anything eternal write
that is not steeped in the humour of the night'

"Steeped in the humour of the night-----that was the task of the great writer---to immerse oneself in the humour of the night, to harness the power of darkness for artistic creation. How else could the sublime dark authors----Kafka, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Hardy, Camus, Plath, Poe----have illuminated the tragedy lurking in the human condition? Not by removing oneself from life, not by sitting back and observing the passing show."



And this "show" of course also revolves around subsistence. You can only spend hours and hours meditating if you have the luxury to be able to afford to. In other words, only if there are others who are not meditating, but are, instead, out in the world growing your food and building your shelters and sewing your clothes and mass producing all of the hundreds of additional material accouterments that some folks seem to imagine grow on trees near the cash registers in Walmart.

Meditating is, however, certainly a respectable way to mediate between being and nothingness. And to the extent it provides people with an expedient, provisional, pro tempore way out of the trials and tribulations that suffuse the existential labyrinths, why not?

But lots of folks don't stop there. They suffuse the technique itself with a quasi-religous jumble of metaphysical malarky that reconfigures the world into a state of mind. It takes them out of the world, in fact, by exposing it as a mental contraption. Then they subtutute this new mental contraption for the old one and call it "being enlightened" instead.

And just as those who own and operate the churches earn their living through eclesiastical rituals so their Eastern counterparts are more than willing to do the same. Not that they are necessarly being deceptive or ingenuous or manipulative or exploitative in spreading The Word. Most are fervidly sincere. And as long as it works for them there are no arguments likely to deconstruct it. Certainly not mine. And probably not yours.

And fortunately for all the rest of us there will always be plenty of men and women who are ready, willing and able [or, perhaps, as is more likely, conscripted by the need to subsist, sustain families, raise children, pay bills etc.] to adopt the more pragmatic, materialist roles that actually keep the world functioning from day to day to day.

Not to mention, of course, the stuff of Shakespeare felt compelled to explore.

rp