Irving Shattock Mindfulness Experiment. Satipatthana Meditation (fragments)

1. START
Recently, a great number of books about meditation have appeared. Some of them are excellent and treat the subject as something that the average person could do without risking being branded as an eccentric. Others are overly technical and complex. They give readers the impression that only some kind of superman could follow the order of classes they required and perform all the procedures. My goal is not to increase the number of printed manuals: I want to talk about my own experience of taking a special meditation course at the Saasana Yita center in Rangoon. I think it might be of interest to others as well, not because I have any special ability to meditate or special knowledge, but just for the opposite reason. I am not endowed with any special psychic qualities or mystical inclinations; spiritually, no doubt, I am nothing more than an average person, and the stage to which I was able to bring this course of satipatthana during my trip, my experiences in the process of deep penetration into my mind, the results of training - all this could be expected by anyone else. a person who temporarily postpones his daily activities for the same purpose.
As will be explained below, during the course I had to drastically change my eating and sleeping habits. My daily routine may seem too harsh to accept voluntarily. But in fact, Western habits fell away from me without any effort, and this did not create any inconvenience, in all likelihood because the pace of my life until now was clearly too low. And, of course, during the training I was among many people doing the same thing as me; my situation was like that of a teenager who entered a new school: he easily enters a new routine, without feeling that sometimes it turns out to be unusually tiring.
In Burma, taking this special course is quite common for lay people: many Burmese - including some of the country's prominent public figures - go to one of the meditation centers for a period of rigorous meditation practice, which usually lasts at least six weeks. This happens once or twice during their business life, and also, of course, again after retirement. During my stay at the Center, among many other visitors, there was the newly retired police chief of Rangoon, who was undergoing a “recovery course”. One day he came to see me and explained why he felt the need to take this course. In the cell next to mine was a young man, the owner of several factories of pasteurized milk, who supplied the whole of Rangoon with his products. He turned out to be a very active layman, having already once completed a training course at the center of Saasan. True, it seems to me that he did not take the course as seriously as the others, because his wife visited him daily, and he was inclined to associate with other “students”.
Although the center did not have any supervision over the implementation of the daily routine, here they were extremely disapproving of talking and reading. This was especially true for those who were taking a course of strict meditation, and for the monks who were there, such a pastime was strictly prohibited.
Perhaps the reader will be interested in the question of what made me decide to try my hand at meditation, and why I had to choose a Buddhist monastery for this purpose. Both of these questions are very important, and since the justification of this book depends on the answers to them, I would like to deviate a little from the main line of the story and find out from the very beginning what was the motive and reason for this act, which seemed to many of my friends to be at least unusual. (“Improvements” of modern civilization)
Few of us would voluntarily exchange our current way of life for conditions that existed, say, two hundred years ago, if we could not at the same time receive guarantees that in such an exchange we would find ourselves among the well-to-do class. But even then, despite the romantic coloring of the life of those days, as seen in the movies and many novels, we would find an unsettled, rough, often unsanitary and unattractive life. Stripped of the embellishments of false romance, the inconveniences and shortcomings of those days stand out sharply when viewed from the happier experience of our present life. Now we have become so accustomed to comfort and conveniences that if we had to settle forever in conditions where they are absent, it would be a shock for us, destroying everything. illusions.
Exactly the same kind of impressions would evidently have come out of the conditions of our modern life by a person who would live two hundred years later; but we who live under these conditions find it difficult to discover things that are destructive to us. We are accustomed to them, we agree with them and in many cases do not even understand their harm. Besides, if some people notice that some of the habits and customs of our civilization have a bad influence on us, they can change little. The wave of progress brings with it these harmful effects, and they pass on under the guise of the advantages that come with them. But there is very little an individual can do to reduce the amount of destructive forces at work around him, even if he is aware of their existence and is able to notice them. It is precisely this book that mainly expresses the individual's point of view on those phenomena which tend to overwhelm our ability to withstand external circumstances. It is required to understand in a new way the source of this ability, as well as to know the peculiar technique for its development. But it is difficult for us ourselves to show enough enthusiasm for any decisive reorientation of our point of view. In general, we are too satisfied with the improvements we have made to our lifestyle to pay attention to what is happening around us. We are not tempted to look at today through the eyes of the future.
Many of the changes that hygiene and the various adjustments to our comforts have brought with them in the last hundred and fifty years have not been wholly useful. We have greatly increased the percentage of people reaching old age, while at the same time not being able to provide them with something better than just existence. We have eradicated many diseases that were a misfortune to entire nations and exterminated many people; at the same time, we have created new and even less curable ailments. We have greatly reduced human suffering and increased mass entertainment without being able to make it constructive. In fact, we are better off, better off, and better off, much better educated (if you know what that is) than our ancestors were two hundred years ago. However, we are in danger of being overprotected from such phenomena, which the body could resist on its own. Of course, the degree of our security is far from ideal. And we opened ourselves up to a host of hidden and far more complex disorders. We live in conditions of sterilization, immunization and prevention; these measures will go on until we are stocked with all sorts of preventive measures, including those that protect us from micro-organisms addicted to our most reliable medicines. Thus, the body has less and less reason to build its own defenses.
But the physical aspect of excessive security is certainly not the worst of the so-called "improvements" in housing conditions. The constant excitement inherent in modern life overwhelms our entire being during wakefulness, and often during sleep. The rapid succession of events in private, national, international, and in the near future planetary life keeps us jumping from one tension to another, from one emotion to another, as a result of which our adrenal glands are overloaded. If there is any break in this feverish excitement of our nerves, we feel bored. We are accustomed to the constant stimulation of the senses and do not know what to do with the mind when it is absent. In addition, the symptom of boredom is drowned out by drugs. There are means to induce relaxation, and there are means to spur us on when the relaxation is over. There are means to put us to sleep, and there are others to wake us up. The same thing happens to the brain as to the body: it is relieved of most of the burden of nature, but with much more serious and far-reaching consequences: its defenses are undermined, and the strength that it contains within itself is not able to work out. natural antidote. The need for an innate antidote to the increasing nervous tension to which we are now and under normal conditions is a matter of the utmost importance. But so far there is no such antidote.
“But look,” someone might object, “how easy it is now for any person to take advantage of some form of recreation; and with the reduction of working hours thanks to automation, even more opportunities open up here!” But such a prospect threatens the emergence of even more number of diseases arising from nervous tension, if this danger is not noticed in time and measures are not taken to prepare people for life in conditions of unemployment. For in many cases rest only means the introduction of a series of tensions of a different type, and true rest