A Structured Path

I can't help but be a little excited.

I left the 10-day meditation retreat in Barre, MA without having had the religious experience (of rapture/catharsis) that I'm pretty sure is common at these kinds of things. No obvious life-changing experience, no new chest-beating resolution to be this or that from now on. Just, perhaps, a temporarily enhanced sense of ease and a subtle shift in understanding.

But like a bottle of Korean soju, it just crept up on me and suddenly I'm drunk. I will explain.

First the subtle shifts--

One of the things that struck me at the retreat was the power of noble silence. With noone saying nary a word to one another (except in officially sanctioned teacher Q&A sessions) I could feel the safety and protection of being free from gossip and collective judging. Thus I developed a more kinesthetic appreciation of morality -- in this case, right speech -- as essential to one's quest for happiness. That is to say, I came to understand happiness as a positive motivation for being moral, as opposed to our culturally normal understanding of morality requiring negative motivation (to avoid blame and guilt).

To be sure, I've always been a generally moral person, perhaps more so than the average guy -- but the extra striving for some higher level of morality I never got around to, because the question was always felt, "What's in it for me?" This question has now been answered. Morality (right speech, right action, right livelihood) purifies the mind and opens the heart, thereby aiding them in receiving true understanding about the nature of suffering and how to achieve liberation from that suffering -- happiness.

The second subtle shift was a small triumph by which I finally managed to experience some emotional satisfaction through faithful execution of process despite unpleasant results. It was one of the many 45-minute [meditation] sits; in this particular one, I had spent an egregious 98% of the time lost in fantasy, managing to bring myself back to the present moment only 2-3 times. After the sit ended, I felt the old familiar feelings of self-judgment, worthlessness and doubt creeping in, but I remembered something from a dharma talk the other night -- a teacher said that the US space shuttle, on its way to the space station, is off-course 98% of the time, yet it manages to reach its destination without fail. (Except when it blows up.) And so I learned to feel good about the process of getting back on track. After all, this is the way it is with any kind of growth -- physical training, learning to play an instrument, etc. -- it is during those times when you feel most weak but are still trying that you are growing the most. The trick is to be able to draw enough emotional strength from that to keep yourself going despite discouraging results from time to time.

Attachment to results is one of those things that has been fucking me in the ass for years, so this is a small source of hope for me.

I know these sound pretty big, and I guess they are, but the reason I called them subtle shifts in understanding is that I considered them to be just the acquisition of more tools in the same quest for personal growth that I've alway had.

But it's kind of like I just took a second look in the mirror and, what the -- I'm now a Buddhist. That is to say, I'm no longer interested in meditation for just the mental training -- but I have perhaps unconsciously taken the Buddha's invitation, Ehi Passiko ("come and see for yourself [what is true]"), and I have gotten a much clearer glimpse of what I can make of this life. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path -- I'm in. I mean, it's still the same quest, but Buddhism has given it a whole lot more structure than it had before. Structure is good.

So, not too shabby. Still a lot of details to figure out, like how I'm going to stop eating meat and killing mosquitoes, and what the hell I'm gonna do about my work.