Vipassana Trip Report by Rap Genius Founder

- The overzealous assistant has his own thing going on, and so do you. That's actually an AWESOME interaction to have. How do you feel about it? Where is coming from your body? Good fodder for vipassana.

- The Trappist monks has the same practiced with a different set of cultural bias. Something to investigate.

- You can look up Daniel Ingram's book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. It's a little advanced, but the coolest thing about his book is that the framework he talks about is flexible enough that you can see the underlying practice regardless of cultural biases.

  - When you reach a tipping point of realization, you find yourself not at all bothered by these cultural biases or little difference. The essential practice is still the same.

  - The conservative morality and reincarnation falls out of the insights people have doing these practices. Ingram has a great teaching, that morality is putting the realization you received on the cushion in every day life. It might manifest as conservative, it might not. The important thing is that *you* are living the realizations you received through your practice. The labels, conservative or otherwise, eventually fall away.

  - Likewise, it is quite all right for you not to believe in reincarnation. You do this long enough, you start finding things about incarnation cycles. Until you've had those experiences, that one is a tough one to swallow for most people. And why should they accept it when they have not directly realized it?

I think they are specific to the technique, but not the teacher. E.g. someone doing concentration meditation (as opposed to insight meditation) is going to have very different experiences.

I don't think the fact that different spiritual techniques yield different experiences says much about their validity though. After all, you could easily consider normal everyday life to be a spiritual technique that yields a certain set of experiences.

"To further the question, are you saying that the 'counterintuitive claims' are something at which (again given enough practice/discipline) we all would arrive, or just that we would all share something similar to the experiences that they were born from?"

I think that for every technique there is a set (in the mathematical sense) of experiences that can be experienced via that technique. And every time you practice the technique, you're basically picking out an experience from that set at random (though certain experiences need certain requisite skill levels). So if you were skilled enough and had enough practice then your odds of having a given experience would increase, but they'd probably never be 100%.

You can see that though, for example, with the Johns Hopkins psilocybin trials, the odds of having some mystical experience over the course of two high-dose sessions are about 80%. Some people might be floating through the universe, others might experience the sum total of everything that ever can and will and has happened from every perspective, others might life a life review, others might relive their birth, etc. But the more times you do it, the more of these experiences you will eventually have.

http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/

(Gil Fronsdal, Introduction to Meditation)

They're a good secular introduction to mindfulness meditation. (Gil Fronsdal is a buddhist, but in this series he takes great care to avoid mixing the religious aspects with the meditation teaching, to the extent of jokingly referring to the "b-word")

I've also mentioned "Mindfulness in Plain English" elsewhere: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Both of them address the problems you mention. And actually they're not so much problems as your perception of them are - you get better by practising observing and guiding your attention back to your breath (or whatever other object of focus you choose), and you get that practice by constantly losing focus.

Some people will experience it getting much worse after a while, even. After a few weeks I went through a period where I'd get really intense "monkey mind". That is, I'd sit down to meditate, and my mind would go completely crazy. All kinds of things would pop into my head, including totally ridiculous and pointless concerns, and concentration was impossible.

Then I had a period where I'd get an intense feeling that I hadn't set my alarm (I was meditating before I had to leave for work, and this feeling indicated that I was running late, and needed to look at the watch immediately). If I looked at my watch, the feeling would still reassert itself a few minutes later. I had to look at my watch several times, and confirm and reconfirm that the alarm was set and the countdown running before I started meditating to weaken the feeling, and then still spent weeks overcoming the desire to look at my watch before it finally subsided.

But it all passed, and while I don't meditate as often as I like to, it's gotten a lot easier with time. That is not to say it is easy, and as with pretty much everything else, you can always push further into more advanced practices. But you get to a stage where you feel that you are actually meditating rather than fighting off total chaos in your mind, and that makes it a lot easier to want to sit regularly.

Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't find a teacher. By all means. But you can make a good start by yourself, and you can find a lot of good (and free) guidance online as a starting point.

I have not done a 10 day sit as described in TFA, but I've had a passably regular Vipassana-style meditation practice for a few years now, and concentration and impulse control have been two major benefits in my life.

One thing that comes with impulse control, but I find valuable enough to merit mentioning on its own, is that I am now much better at letting go of thoughts. I used to have difficulty with intrusive thoughts--fantasies of violence or humiliation that would play on loop in my mind. Now, they appear, drift once through my mind, and are gone. This also applies to getting songs stuck in my head.

For context, I grew up in the Christian church, identify as atheist, and have only a mild intellectual interest in the spiritual trappings of the tradition from which meditation comes to me.