Kill and find yourself [Great Insight]

[tonatiuh8]

This is a review of Vipassana Meditation course that SEAN MESSENGER took. I posted cause it has some awesome wisdom.

It's been three days since I came home from my 11-day (10 days plus, don't trust their website! silent Vipassana retreat.

Like Jane's Addiction said, three days since I came aground.

I was convinced I'd come right home and start babbling about the experience and immediately turn into one of those cultists who does something and recruits everyone around them (god knows I went thru that phase after I tried the Landmark Forum... I am nothing if not a True Believer).

But to be honest, I had really underestimated the effect. See, after the retreat, I was all fired up. We finally got to talk to the people we'd been surrounded by, but isolated from, for the entire time, and it was like a real brother and sisterhood was built just from the shared experience. We have never spoken but we understood each other because we now understood something about ourselves.

I ended up driving home with one girl in my car and in convoy with another. Both wicked cute Latin girls from Miami who I had never met before, and I found myself crushing for real on one and talking non-stop to both of them the entire trip about everything... family, dating, relationships, sex, girl-girl action, you name it.

And my crushing felt different. They teach you in Vipassana that the root cause of all sadness, pain and misery is simply craving. You crave what you do not have, and then once you get it, you don't really want it. You crave freedom from those things you do not want, and once you get that freedom, you want to go back.

Sounds familiar, right? It's the arc of every single relationship and breakup every single dude I know has been through.

Dude sees girl. Dude desires girl. Girl triggers desires dude has had for other girls... real life, high school, magazines, porn. Dude runs his game to impress girl. Dude gets girl on date. Dude gets girl in bed. Dude battles and battles and battles to get those panties off and get girl's pussy juice all over his rock-hard cock, convinced this is what he really needs.

Dude comes. Dude rolls over and sleeps. Dude wakes up and instantly it's not the same. Sometimes dude still likes the girl, develops feelings, and makes her his girlfriend. Sometimes he even buys her a ring, or goes all in on a big party with friends and family and swears to be with only her till the day he dies.

Sometimes dude wants to escape right away.

But as soon as he gets out, he wants her back. He fights for his freedom, and then feels lost like Brooks Hadlin in Shawshank and just wants to go back home to prison where things make sense.

But either way, dude doesn't stop craving. He sees another girl and desires her. He sees a cool car and desires it. He sees a better job, a cooler city, a nicer house, and desires them all. And whatever he gets, the desire grows.

It's why financial experts will tell you that getting a raise at work does not lead to increased savings, because we all simply spend whatever we make.

We crave that which we do not have.

And we hate what we do not want.


I have always craved what I did not have. I date one girl and want another. I date two and want three. I date three and want one good one. I get one good one and want better. I get better and want committment. I get commitment and want freedom. I get freedom and want intimacy. I get intimacy and want to be alone. I get alone and want to die.

I hate being trapped so I run. I run and want to run more. I run more and feel lost. I feel lost and trap myself. I hate my actions so I stop acting. I hate stillness so I distract myself. I hate distractions so I get to work. I hate my work so I go to sleep.

And sleep is really the only release, isn't it? The sweet bliss of nothingness, where no ghosts can find you and no desires can drive you. You are open to the whims of the secret world and you follow no matter where they go.

But what if you could release that craving and see it for exactly what it is?

It is just a pulse. It arises and falls away. And even if it returns like a persistent toothache, it still follows the same pulse. Arise and fall away. Arise and fall away.


Arise.

Fall away.

That is the rhythm of our lives. Think about the last real physical pain you had. Was it a steady state? Or did it throb? Did it get better and then worse? Did it arise?

Did it fall?

Think of the last euphoric moment you felt. Maybe it was an orgasm. You feel you blood rise, you feel it fall. You pump harder and faster, you feel the build, and you finally feel the rise, and crest and break... and fall.

You feel the spasm after. The jolt of electricity, the release. The shiver.

Your body is always pulsing with your blood. You desires are always coming and going. But we train ourselves every moment to react to the coming so we totally miss the going.

When someone insults you, your first instinct is to strike back. But if you walk away, you find they fade really fast.

When you are hurting, you want to cover and protect. But if you turn your attention to something else, you find you can forget.

When you are in love, you get obsessed and want her every moment. But when another pretty girl walks by, you turn your head.


There is no joy, no peace, no happiness in craving. There is only more dissatisfaction. You can chase and catch all the women in the world, and you will always want more. You can be the best ever, and still be subject to tumbling from your peak as soon as you fail.

Every thing you've ever craved and everything you've ever hated is scorched into your body, and when you find something similar, you get the same reaction. And the only way out is to go into it.

Go into it, and DON'T react.

Everything changes, and everything is temporary. The worst night is always followed by morning. The worst torture will eventually end. In the true nature of time, everything is impermanent.

Live the best life you can, and you will still die. Do everything a man can do, and you still can't take it with you.

I spent 10 days, 10 hours per day, working on how to recognize this and retrain my body and my brain to respond in a new way. I trained to feel pain and pleasure the same, simply as phenomenon that come and go. I trained to let go of all the things I thought I needed so I could open myself up to simply loving.

I learned to stop trying to get all I could for myself so I could find a way to give.


And I know this isn't very detailed, but it's hard to pin down feelings in words. I came home high. I came home clean. I came home buzzed.

And then I woke up blank. I woke up strange. I woke up hard.

They tell you when you go in this is like surgery. You are cutting out a big part of yourself. You are digging with knife and laser and forceps and excavating great big chunks of ego, the ego that told you all along who you are, that protected you from pains real and percieved, and shaped you based on what you reacted to in the past instead of letting you see and feel the present for the brand-new moment that it always is.

So what was it really like?

It's an assfucker, man. It's harder than anything. The last two days since i got home i couldn't even leave the house.

But i feel it got a lot of the old damage all the way out of me and now it's like i have to, or get to, start over. It's like i CAN'T go back and remember the stuff that was haunting me before, even the hard stuff like the breakup and gia dying. It's there, somewhere, but faded.

And it's like that line in swingers... you miss the pain, cos you lived with it for so long.

Killing the part of your identity you clung to the most because it kept everything else hidden... they say ego death is the hardest.

I underestimated the effect. I put myself on the line, and did it knowing that my additional challenges of having Bipolar and ADHD would only make things riskier. I did it not understanding it would make me see my world as I've made it, and see it like a stranger.

I see the distances I created and the barriers I put up and now they are intolerable to me. The very things that I built to keep me safe now look as they are... the things that will keep me dying slowly every day unless I make a change.

Vipassana shows you how to change yourself with real work every day into a person who gives Love freely, with no expectation of reward. It does let you see and feel what it's like to be at peace and be free of fear.

But it's only a start, and it takes every day to make it happen. I am done bouncing from answer to answer. Right or wrong, this is the path I will take and see where it goes. I mean, fuck, the Buddha became the Buddha for a reason. It wasn't like an accident. We are, indeed, waves and particles. We are nothing permanent. We are in the flow already, and all we need to do is train ourselves to feel that every moment of every day.



I cannot tell you what to do. But I can tell you that if you have the courage to see what life really is, and the strength to kill yourself in order to find yourself, this hard road is the only way to go.


And now that you know that me AND Rivers Cuomo, and John Frusciante have done it, well, that's a holy trinity of cool right there.


Be Happy,

Sean


P.S. Thanks to my bro Daniel Johnson from PU101 for cementing my decision to do this. Like he said, it's the world's only 2500-year-old workshop with proven results.


P.P.S. And now I've got to go meditate. Every day, baby. Two hours a day. This ain't no joke.

go to: Vipassana Review - Sean's Take, Part 1 - Helping Real Men Find Real Love -- No Games, No Tricks, No Bullshit for discussion.