Vipassana Reflections, Part III – Truth.
Which brings me to the final insight. Throughout the retreat I had been starting to pay attention to my perceptions. Which is usually pretty tough to do in the sped up busy world of everyday life. But after 10 days of quiet, it gets a lot easier to notice how we notice. And I could see as soon as I looked at anything, or anyone, there would instantly be a judgment or opinion about that object. I could see my biases about the people around me, which had been accumulating the whole time. Which oftens leads to a somewhat unsettling final day, when we all get to talk to each other. Throughout the 10 days of silence, I’ve constructed all these stories in my head about everyone, decided who I like and who I don’t – all without talking to them! But when I talk to them I see how wrong I usually am – that all of them have so many interesting layers to their lives and so much to share.
And I brought this insight about perception to myself, and seeing the stories that I tell about myself. About who I am. About why I matter. About my past. About my future. These layers of identity that I hold on to. That I am a husband. Son. Career counsellor. Farmer. Student. Meditator. Smart. Funny. Helpful. Creative. Or negatively – lame, boring, selfish, and worse. And I saw the power of these stories to affect my behaviour. That they are just stories, and not the actual truth. But I take them to be the truth, and act accordingly. And these stories can limit me in many ways.
In relation to myself and the world, I started to see that what I usually take as perception, and the truth, was rarely that. I think that I am holding up a flashlight to the world and seeing things as they are, but it’s more like I’m holding up a projector – shining images onto everyone and everything – seeing these images projected as if they are the truth.
Things got a little cosmic when I started applying this idea to my perception of my inner experience. I could see how I was projecting images and stories even to my inner experience. That when scanning my body, I would actually be picturing it in my mind at the same time. Or when feeling something intense, I would be telling a story about it simultaneously – maybe telling myself why it was there, judging it for being bad, or trying to hold on to it if it was pleasant. But one of the most intense stories or projections, was that these things were real and solid and ME.
As I started to pay attention, I started seeing that rather than solid things, they were more like holograms projected by my awareness. For those of you that have played with the new virtual reality devices, this can be pretty easy to relate to. When you put on the headset and look around, you see a new reality – and it feels amazingly real. It looks like you are underwater, or on a mountain – but you are just sitting on a couch. And what I take to be reality, is NOT – it is my perception/projection of it. When I think I am seeing an image, I am actually seeing the signal from the light entering my eyeballs, flipped upsidedown by the optic structure, flipped again to be rightside up by my brain, and then edited to focus on key parts, leave out others, and even fill in blind spots – like an airbrushed reality. And all of that is just happening INSIDE MY HEAD.
As I looked at those perceptions, they started to dissolve and I saw them in a new way. Not as solid things, but instead as ripples of consciousness. Like how a wave isn’t a real separate thing – it just a temporary manifestation of the water, NOT separate from it. At this point basically everything dissolved into just pure spacious awareness with ripples coming and going. There was nothing solid. Nothing to fight. Nothing to hold. Nothing to do. Just peace. I was identified now with only my awareness. This lasted for a little while (maybe an hour?) and then it too passed and I started coming back to more normal levels of awareness.
K. Miguel Hahn 