Parable of the meditator, part 3.
On changing the mind.
[This essay is part 3 of 3—a series exploring Vipassana meditation. I humbly invite you to read part 1 and part 2 for a richer reading experience.]
“Here we are—
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping Life,
Mind,
Shaping Mind,
God,
Shaping God.”
– Earthseed, Verse 35, Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Dear reader,
I change my mind.
I mean this in myriad.
I mean that I am here, there, everywhere. Never standing still.
I mean that I am surfer, carving lines into thought’s gray matter.1
I mean that the River is the never the same water.2
That I am an eight-limbed Thinking Woman, synapses wet with creation.3 4
Nothing more and nothing less than skin-shedding, shapeshifting, indeterminate dynamism.
I mean that my mind is make believe
-ing that it belongs only to itself.
It is made up about nothing; made of everything.
So magnificently malleable.
I mean this practically in that I want to challenge everything I said in part 1 and 2.
To break it down
then flesh it out
in feather,
fur,
and bone.
Last week, I began working with The Lineages of Change Tarot deck, rooted in the wisdom of Octavia E. Butler alongside a canon of Black and Brown visionaries and changemakers.
opens the booklet with:“We began with the perspective of Octavia E. Butler: once you see what is, once you see a pattern in the structures and changes around you, you can begin to shape your present and future realities. You can partner with the constant force of change. As Butler taught us, we are not meant to be mere observers, we can be shapers of change.”
I set down the book and blinked slowly, heavily, a few times in a row. You know, the kind of stupefied response when you’ve just been schooled by something you thought you already knew.
“We are not meant to be mere observers.”
You see, I’ve grounded the previous two essays in Octavia’s teachings on change—how it’s the most natural law embedded into every atom and experience of the universe. I rolled her verses around in my head as I sat for nine hours of meditation a day. I even went so far as to say that observing, i.e. witnessing, is one of the most important strategies we can employ during this unsettling political unraveling. And yet, I missed the entire point—the observation of impermanence means you shape, not merely accept, the present reality.5
Change is calling us into partnership. Yet in Vipassana, we simply sit there, staring at the invitation with eyes closed.
We are taught to accept the present reality because the law of nature is that it will change. And it does change. That much is profoundly true. But what we don’t get to explore is what changes it. What we don’t get to explore is that the what can be us. What we don’t get to utilize is our imagination, the very tool that visionaries like Octavia would have us use to create a Life-giving future.
We don’t get to explore that we actually can and should participate in change, i.e. transformation i.e. liberation, not just for ourselves, but for others. On behalf of others. On behalf of collective welfare. On behalf of Life. That this is actually inherent in the Buddha’s story—more to come on that later.
The narrative in the Vipassana course, and more broadly in the wellness space, is most often a story of self. A single person’s journey. Siddhartha’s story. Your story. There is an astounding lack of recognition for all who help us get free, and for whom we get free.
And while there is tremendous value that comes from learning to liberate oneself, from the experiential awareness of our own capacity for healing—getting free is never actually achieved alone. I know I said that ultimately, we’re the only one who can do the work. And that is true. Yet it is incomplete.
When we take the time to reflect on why it matters that we, I’m talking singular we (i.e. me) get free, we realize the ultimate answer isn’t about singular “us” at all.
What’s the point of getting free if others aren’t coming with us? What’s the point of Awakening if we wake up alone? Is it real freedom if it still moves along a hierarchy?
The world is the same when we leave the retreat center. In the case of this year, it was actually much worse, having emerged on inauguration day. What matters is how we move together, from that point on.
“The function of freedom is to free somebody else.” – Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard
The individualistic approach of this course makes sense. While Vipassana meditation is an ancient, 2,500 year-old practice birthed in India, it’s gained massive popularity and globalized within the postmodern era.
Fast forward (eh, backward) to 1800’s imperialism, when much of Southeast Asia was under European colonial rule. It was during this time when Western political and economic motivations severed the mind, body, Earth, Spirit, and community from their original whole; oppressed many cultural and spiritual practices; and forced the individual into the center of the collective psyche.
As a result, meditation became stripped of its animistic, devotional, ritualistic essence and instead framed as a practice for and of the mind. For and of the self.
Fast forward to today, and we see it often regarded as a tool designed to optimize and improve. To gain something.
Part of why S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana teaching is so popular is because of its emphasis on results, as well as the non-sectarian nature of the instruction. That anyone of any faith, background, or culture can benefit from this practice is part of its endurance and widespread resonance. Yet at its deepest root, it’s not a-spiritual at all.
I say this with the utmost gratitude, humility, and respect for Goenka, for the teaching, the technique, and the network of teachers, practitioners, and volunteers who make these courses possible, for the massive amount of knowledge that I am nowhere close to understanding.
Yet I also say this knowing there’s a much richer context than what is offered in the course, and I often found myself unsatiated. And no, it wasn’t the banana for dinner.
In the course, we were repeatedly cautioned against blind faith and devotion, and overwhelmingly oriented toward practice and self. I largely align with this—we embody what we practice, not what we intend. We are told that this aversion to the more magical elements stems from cultural context during the Buddha’s lifetime, when society was saturated with elaborate ritual. Siddhartha foresaw that ritual would become empty and that people would become so over-reliant upon external salvation that they would ignore their own responsibility to improve their lives.
Yes, annnnnd, we are living in a different time. A time starved of collective ritual. Ripe with cultural appropriation. Deep in a metastasized spiritual crisis manifesting as a polycrisis of climate, economic, environmental, health, authoritarian, and social injustice.
I worry when it comes to modern day mindfulness that we’ve over-indexed into the realm of practicality and individual benefit.
That we take a seat to take something.
This is not to say that meditation and mindfulness don’t help billions of people, nor that we should stop practicing. Quite the opposite, actually. This is simply to raise, in the spirit of contemplation, that in this course there’s an overemphasis on what actually might be causing our pain (i.e. individualism) and an under-emphasis on what could actually heal it—the fully alive and sentient cosmological web of seen and unseen Life that holds our mind, every day, all of the time. Our forever place of belonging.
That is to say, I think we need more God.
Speaking of God: Trees.
You may have noticed that I’ve included a lot photos of trees in these essays. You may know that the Buddha achieved Full Enlightenment sitting beneath a tree. That he selected a fig tree, now named the Ficus religiosa, to shelter him for the legendary 49-day sit.
I could not stop thinking about trees throughout the entirety of the course. Maybe it was because they were in parable after parable shared by our teacher. Maybe it was because our campus was nested within a towering forest of pine and oak. Maybe it was because I couldn’t talk to anyone but them.
At the same time, I could not stop thinking about how Siddhartha knew what to do to achieve Enlightenment. We were learning the technique as he practiced it, as he taught it. Going deeper and deeper into the mind-matter matrix. But I didn’t understand how, at the time, he knew what next step to take. How he knew to start with the upper lip. To then scan the surface of the body in rigorous, systemic order. To then to penetrate inside in the organs and tissues, and so on.
We were just told that he was somehow figuring it out, alone.
I signed up for another interview to speak with the teacher.
I sat down on my floor cushion, wide-eyed, and asked, “So, could you tell me more about the trees?”
I received a wide-eyed stare back.
“Sorry, let me zoom out. I think about Nature a lot. More-than-human intelligence. I like to write about it. We keep hearing about the importance of trees in the Buddha’s life, and I’m wrestling with this question of how he knew what to do, and I have a theory that sitting at the base of a tree has something to do with it. So I’m wondering if you could tell me more about that.”
With no disrespect to my teacher, I was simply told that, “Yes, there are a lot of beautiful, miraculous stories involving trees. They were very important in the Buddha’s life. There’s a lot of literature you can read about it. But are you having any trouble with the technique?”
I quickly realized that the point of this time was to talk practice, not ecology. I thanked her and shuffled out of the room, back into the woods.
I still need to read those books, but what I can tell you now is this:
The forest is inextricable from Buddhism.
Buddhism emerged within the wet, hot tropical jungles of India and Southeast Asia, lush with a magical animist belief system teeming with forest spirits. Ancient monks quite literally worked with these spirits, through meditation, to survive in this landscape. It was a lifeway that reinforced a relational web in which flora, fauna, and spirits were inextricably connected.
We are often told that Siddhartha sat alone meditating with his own mind, and on one particular full moon, achieved Full Enlightenment. Yet, that’s not exactly true:
“The full story has an ecology to it. To remember the full story is to remember the tree under which the Buddha sat. And the shape of the Pippa leaf, which I've heard is the same shape as the mouth makes as it makes its journey through the ‘om’ sound…we need the story of the tree with all its leaves humming and the vast cosmos wheeling about that tree. We need the serpent, which coiled about the Buddha and sheltered him from the storm. We need his dark skin. The Buddha had dark skin, remember?
We need his ribs sticking out like branches, rising and falling with breath wet with morning dew. We need the sweet rice milk fed to him by Sujata when he'd almost given up. We need the morning star of realization and his hand gently touching the Earth. There's a vibration at the place where Awakened fingers touched the Earth for the first time. Feel it.
The Buddha wasn't optimizing or using mindfulness practice to gain something. He was Existence breathing itself in full knowledge of itself, and the world bowed, and flowers fell in the moment of Awakening.” – Joshua Michael Schrei, The Emerald, (Why Mindfulness Isn’t Enough)
It is far easier to understand how the Buddha was his own teacher when viewed through an ecological, animist, decolonized context.
The Buddha wasn’t just meditating with his own mind—it was the world’s mind.
For what is the mind anyway if not Earth? Everything is Earth. Every single thing that exists is made of the Earth.
“The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth...by acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths.” – David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
Toward the end of the course, we are told to be joyful about our capacity for self-liberation and to be grateful for the preciousness of human life, for humans are the only life-form capable of achieving such realms of consciousness.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That our teacher could place a human above a bird. A being trapped by the suffering of its own existence above a free and soaring eagle.
The supremacy was overt.
“It is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience...originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth. When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself—the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.” – David Abram
Decolonizing our minds, and our meditation practice, means remembering ourselves back into the living world. Remembering that individual optimization and ascension never mattered when the community’s wellbeing is what mattered.
It means that we—and our minds—belong to the Land, not the other way around.
How elitist to sit in meditation witnessing ourselves and believe the Earth is not witnessing us back.
To label sensation as proprioception instead of windstorm, sand, and snow.
To believe that existence begins and ends with our species.
Even in the moment of his Awakening, Siddhartha still had a body. Still lived within an all-encompassing Earth. We are told that Full Liberation means freeing your soul from the cycle of reincarnation—never having to return to Earth.
I can honestly think of nothing worse.
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Recent research has shown that the mind actually thinks in waves, rather than continuous motion.
This is a common metaphor used in the course to instill the lesson of “the past is the past. It is already gone.”
In Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook, Paula Gunn Allen writes of the Keres’ story of Thinking Woman, Stitch-tche-na-ko, the Creator of all. When She has a form, it is that of a spider.
“Spider Grandmother, the major deity of the Keres, is weaver and thinker: she thinks, therefore we are…a Great Goddess whose medicine power is so vast (or whose being is so complete and focused) that she brings thoughts or ideas into being…[her power] is pure, and cleaner than the void.”
Traditional yoga has eight limbs. Only the final ones are meditative. The rest are life practices designed to construct context—it was understood that meditation wasn't just a free floating practice to be done on its own. Via The Emerald.
Observe, orient, decide, act. Four simple steps for what to do right now, in that order. Via adrienne marie brown.