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So what will we do?
“I am doing a mediation retreat” you have probably said it, told someone. But what will you do?
I, ram, is holding a retreat. How do I do this? When I was training, I would have a formula. In my first vipassana retreats that I held [it was
not called that, it came form a slightly different tradition but in essence was the same] I was very exacting: every day, every session, every
meditation followed a precise formula. That formula was the way that the theravadans practice, systematically, step by step, layer by layer.
Now, it’s like I am in air traffic control. There a number of planes and runways. I’m not sure if you are the planes, I think so. The runways
are the different paths, of course, the pathways to landing.
Like an air traffic controller, I don’t know so much about the passengers. I’m interested in the type of plane, what it needs for a
successful landing.
There will be people on those planes who will be saying ‘why is he making us wait? Or ‘why do we have to land here’. They might even
see that the airport they hoped to land in is not the one they have arrived at!
I think this is usual in all meditation: you are not what you think yourself to be; you will not arrive where you want to arrive. But when
you truly arrive all your fears will have a place into which they comfortably and easily dissolve. Like the trash in the toilet on a plane.
You press the button and it is vaporised.
It’s a reasonable analogy because even vaporised it’s being recycled for good or bad somewhere, just like when we truly let go. What we let go
might never return, dissolved into inner space. Some aspect of its form may return any day. It may arise somewhere else. No one will
recognise it as you or yours.
So these runways are the various years of development of this particular airport. What is it this airport? It’s a means to land, to root.
But also to take off, to move to a different physicality and a different mentation.
The runways are where we are going to work. What are they?
The runway of supreme understanding based in direct experience without any imagination. This is runway 1, the top grade.
The runway of graduated and precise reference. [settle, space, smile].
it’s a runway where there are reminders are everywhere: such as this is where you are. This is what should happen. When the seas happened,
allow this to happen and so on. The emphasis is on allowing and not doing. And so the short answer to the early question what are we
doing, the answer is nothing. More on that later.
The runway of waiting for an airport bus to take you to the terminal.
How long have we waited in this plane, not knowing where we really are, what we are going to meet – surely all airports are the same? Well,
no, actually they are not.
Even the main runway has an element of this. We all are need to be content really not knowing what is happening, what we are doing!
There’s the runway of close investigation of the stuff required too get us out of the plane and into the terminal. It’s like the passport, the
landing card and the visa. That’s all that is required and we all have them but they are often not recognised. Indeed, many of us have had
them in the wallet for lifetimes. This investigation is stillness, occurrence and awareness.
So first you have to satisfy yourself you have them. But the person who is going to make them useful and transformative – getting into the new
land – is the customs man. Expect that in our case he will be looking at the documents time after time. In fact, there’s a part of the analogy
where you are everyone on the plane. That’s right, you are 50, a hundred, five hundred passengers! The customs mane is going to
examine and verify the documents of every one of you.
And then there is the runway making sure, checking the luggage, except in our airport, it might be that if the luggage comes through,
there’s still work to do. So we check, over and over.
Finally, for now, there is the emergency drill. It’s that part of the plane where little oxygen masks drop out of the roof of the plane and you
start breathing. If you’ve ever used one, or done scuba diving, you might have noticed that the body immediately begins to breath
without pause.
Unlike the emergency that must happen for the oxygen masks to drop down when on a plane, in our retreat scenario, we have a lot of time.
Which is good, because the information card – what is recommended to do – is considerable, but not overwhelming.
When the instructions are followed, quite naturally the ride is smoother. You’ll have to wait and see. Paula’s first plane flight there
was terrible turbulence most of the flight. She thought they were always like that. Your life might be a bit like that, just hanging on,
trying to ignore or avoid the stuff that is making you suffer, putting you in fear and so on. The breathing mask is a chance to let everything
settle itself. And there is that all important word again – allow.
What about the systematised approach then? There’s a system, but it is not an imperative. What is imperative is that you do your very best to
follow the instructions, especially if you feel that you don’t like them – think of a plane circling above, being made to wait for landing because
there is no space on the runway. You can’t land, you must wait until it is the right time. It’s no good asking the controller how long.
We speak a lot here about buddhism, sufism zen and tao. Did you ever see night turning into day? There’s no doubting midday from
midnight, but at what point exactly is the dividing line, it’s impossible to say.
So you’ll get mention of different traditions, and you will have the opportunity to glimpse how some things are the same regardless of the
tradition. When we talk about enlightenment, there can be different grades of meaning of that. Generally, it is accepted that enlightenment
is the point of no return. Pretty much all the traditions agree on that yet each of them will describe it or paint it in a different way.
Where there is no doubt, no question is concerning the ultimate truth, the single reality, the undifferentiated reality. And there already we’ve
used a few different terms to describe the same thing. There is only one truth otherwise it would not be the truth and this truth does not
belong exclusively to any person or tradition.
In each of these traditions there are sub categories. Buddhist canon is vast! It includes of course zen whose compass by contrast is relatively
narrow in that it is hard to describe the method of zen as a system even though the system exists and has itself at least two separate
traditions each with its own methodology. The sufi methods cover virtually every mundane human activity. Taoists are very practical yet
they speak often of magical things.
But you are here to work, to learn how to work usefully and skilfully.