Therefore, I’m not going to describe the technique in detail. Part of this is because I know that if I saw the instructions written out, I would just jump to the end, say “that looks easy,” give it a try for 15 minutes, and then give it up as no good. The technique is simple, but that’s not the same as easy. It’s a completely different experience if you spend a 10 hour day meditating on each incremental step in thoroughly learning the technique. (This is why it makes so much sense to have what seems like an intimidatingly long 10-day course for beginners.) However, I do want to share some of the ideas behind the technique.

Most of what they taught at the intellectual level wasn’t anything new to me, and probably many of you have heard a lot of it before as well. Things like “suffering is caused by attachments to cravings and aversions,” “everything is constantly changing and impermanent,” “the only thing you can really control is how you think and react,” and “only you can truly make yourself happy or unhappy.” The problem is that just knowing this intellectually doesn’t help much because it’s so hard to do anything about it. And for a long time before the life of Gautama Buddha, this theoretical level was all there was, until he came along and created (or rediscovered) a technique for putting the theories into practice. That technique is Vipassana.

The theory says that there are four levels of the mind. The first two are perception and recognition—pretty straightforward utilities that we don’t need to worry about too much. Any sensory input (including thoughts and emotions) passes through these first. The third level is called vedan? in P?li. This is the direct, physical sensation we feel as a result of this input. There are sensations created throughout our body for everything we experience. When we have a reaction to something “out there” in the world, what we are actually responding to is the physical sensation in our body generated by our perception of that object, not the object itself. That response comes from the final level, called sa?kh?ra. It decides whether it likes or dislikes the sensations, then develops cravings or aversions to them, or trots out our old, established, habitual reactions. This is the problematic part, because the world is never conforming perfectly to our wishes, and we’re therefore constantly feeling cravings and aversions that we can’t satisfy, and that’s what makes us unhappy.

The idea behind Vipassana is to learn to set up a filter of sorts between the vedana and sankhara parts of your mind. From a direct experience of the vedana we can choose how best to react, without being slaves to our old habits of behavioral patterns or emotional reactions. The first part of doing this consists in developing your awareness. You learn to be aware of and focus on all the myriad sensations constantly going on in your entire body, from the most obvious to the most subtle. The second part requires developing your equanimity. Whatever sensations you observe, you do so objectively, dispassionately, taking them as neither good nor bad. If the sankhara comes in and tries to make you react, you don’t give in to it. The more you practice this awareness and equanimity together, the more you also come to realize (experientially) how much everything really is constantly changing. These things we form attachments to are coming and going, arising and passing away, all the time. Which makes it easier, of course, to just take things as they come and not form cravings or aversions for them.