Jason: Do you think it makes sense? Okay, so I’m simultaneously trying to learn how to play guitar while I’m doing this. And with guitar, my teachers, we’re starting with some scales, we’re starting with some things that are simple to kind of get some grasp on some basic music theory and whatnot. And with meditation, the breath feels to me similar to scales and that like, this is the basics, kind of get this right so you can build upon that. But beyond breath, then it seems to sort of quickly branch into everything. So, you know, hear sounds, feel sensations, see thoughts bubbling up. I’m wondering if it’s almost better to perhaps, this is the wrong word, but I’ll use it, master the feeling of a sensation, like just focusing on sensations for three months versus trying to focus on all the things that could be in consciousness. Is that at all a useful path or is that sort of missing the point?
Sam: Well, traditionally speaking, that’s often the way Vipassana meditation, the insight meditation, is taught with an object of single focus for some considerable period of time. That usually is the breath when you’re sitting and when you’re walking, it’s the sensations of lifting and moving and placing your feet. And I mean, there’s no problem doing that, except it can become the basis for certain kinds of misunderstandings. And it also, it is intrinsically a concentration practice more than it is an insight practice.
I mean, the thing that you are, you want a certain amount of concentration so that you’re just not spending the whole time thinking without knowing that you’re thinking, but there is this point where the paths of concentration insight break apart and they’re different in that with a concentration practice, you really are trying to focus on a single object like the breath to the exclusion of everything else. And so even noticing anything else is by definition a distraction from the object of meditation.
You want to be so one-pointed on the breath that not only are you not getting lost in thought, you’re not noticing sounds or sensations elsewhere in your body. That pain in your foot is something you are trying not to notice because you’re trying to be with the breath every single instant. And that you can really develop a very powerful experience of concentration and it can become very drug-like and very pleasurable. And that level of concentration can be very useful then to take into what’s called insight practice where you can pay attention to anything.
But it’s not necessary to develop it to such a high level that you’re just the master of that object. And I mean, traditionally people did that, but it’s rare to emphasize that way of starting. But it’s natural to kind of be biased toward an anchor object like the breath for some onsiderable period if that seems to be what’s useful. The danger in opening up awareness to everything in the beginning is that it can become less precise, right? That you can just kind of space out and not really notice it. You can feel like there’s not enough precision in your practice, there’s a vagueness to it all. You’re not really making clear contact with anything. And if you ever feel like that, yeah, it can be useful to then just go back to the breath and just do a session where it’s just, you know, you’re just paying attention to the rising and falling of the abdomen or the chest or the sensations in your nostrils to the exclusion of anything else.
And you can notice what are called the three characteristics of phenomenon in Vipassana, even just focusing on the breath and you can notice impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness in the same way. And you can sort of tune up your attention in that way and then open it up to just everything that can be spontaneously noticed in the other channels.
Jason: Yeah, it’s interesting for me to reflect on some moments where I feel like I was getting somewhere, you know, I kind of, as I’ve been thinking about having this conversation with you, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what my experience has really been so far. And it feels kind of like walking through dappled light where I sometimes it’s shining on me and other times it’s not like that’s how this is feeling now, which I like. I like that sometimes it feels like I’m, there’s an insight, there’s an experience that feels like I wouldn’t have had that experience had I not been doing this. And then other times it just sort of nothing is I’m not, I don’t feel like I’m, it’s not that I’m regressing. I just like, I’m not getting to where I want to be without grasping for it.