Pick One Technique and Stick To It
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Let's not get lost in defining the word technique, and after that in determining whether vipassana meditation is a technique. BUT: What sort of attitude is being advocated when we are told to pick one technique and stick to it? And what is happening when we ourselves decide to follow one technique exclusively?
If we look, we may experience fear and reluctance: FEAR that some satisfying state we have attained might be lost, or that a direction of change that we've liked might be cut off, and RELUCTANCE to go beyond what we are content with by trying something new.
All of this frequently leads to a narrowing down, a closing off,
a rigidifying. This rigidifying out of fear may also lead on a grander scale to sectarianism. Have you heard these isolationist words somewhere? --
"We Mahayanists, on the other hand, ..."
"The Adamantine Teaching, which is supreme ..."
"The purity of the U Ba Khin Tradition ..."
"Those pagan heretics ..."
"Death to all infidels ..."
All this is simply more of what we call the net of views, the trap of views, the thicket of views, the clinging to views.
In this we see a self-limiting tendency, a defensive attitude towards, or rather against, an unknown future reality, a desire to keep things (onflowing reality) under our control.
We can appreciate our satisfaction, our contentment, our happiness, our joy, without freezing into immobility, without attempting to ward off change. (Could change be warded off?) But perhaps we will see such a futile attempt arise. If so, maybe we see its basis and get a perspective on it all, so that when this attempt to ward off change does ultimately fail, we are not spun into a turmoil.
At each point in the flow of life, we may see preferences being formulated for what the next moment will be like. Then we may see these preferences channelling our energies. And perhaps once in a while we will begin noticing an occasional neutrality towards the next moments: a full openness, a deep interest in what they will be, in what they are, not for what they do for us or against us, but simply because they are. This is like scientific curiosity, with heart.
The Far Shore: Vipassana, The Practice of Insight, p. 16.
C 1980,1996,2001,2009 by Mitchell Ginsberg.
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