How to Have a Good Meditation Retreat: In Theory and Practice

“If you practice for a result, then it becomes a hindrance.” – Dipa Ma (common advice to students)

“What is important is not the experiences we have but how we get transformed by them.” – Sayadaw U Jagara (recounted by Joseph Goldstein in Reflections on Nibbana)

Thwarted Desires

In Buddhism, there’s a saying that the path is “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Upon starting a meditation practice, many of us notice surprising benefits. Encouraged by these benefits, we may then seek to take the practice further, setting aside days, weeks, or months to retreat from the world, dedicate ourselves to meditation, and reap the fruits of deep stillness.

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

[A tip for those in a rush: If you want to cut straight to the point, skip the intro paragraphs and start at “What Do You Mean, Free?”]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are—and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Steeped in Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be gained through conscious effort, per academic ways of learning. It can grow unconsciously, seeping in through exposure to different cultures and contexts. It can arise suddenly, via flashes of insight churned up from one’s subconscious. Or it can develop over aeons of natural selection, resulting in dispositions suited for survival in an oft-unforgiving world. Yet despite these diverse ways of knowing, all knowledge shares a common requisite: a dependence on intuition.

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

[NOTE TO READER: This essay has been updated. Please read the more recent version (scroll up).]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Bending Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be acquired by conscious effort, per academic ways of learning. It can accumulate unconsciously, seeping in through exposure to various cultures and contexts. It can arise suddenly, via flashes of insight produced by the veiled churnings of the subconscious mind. Or it can develop over aeons of natural trial and error, resulting in dispositions suited for survival in an oft-unforgiving world. But for all its different modes and forms, every bit of knowledge shares one crucial requisite: a dependence on intuition.

Why Bother Meditating?

“Most of our world is mind-spin.”—Stephen Levine

“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.”—David Foster Wallace

 An Unsatisfying Present

As we pass through life, we are consistently conflicted about the present moment. As children, we want the freedom enjoyed by adults, but upon growing up we come to envy the carefree nature of childhood. Thinking of generations past, we envision a world unblighted by modern technology and capitalistic greed, yet projecting to the future we see glimmers of our salvation in green technology made by conscionable business. Whether romanticizing the past or exalting the future, we often wish to be someplace other than the here and now.

The Importance of Awareness

“And yet I think also that if even we today could acquire the knack of maintaining undistracted consciousness between coffee breaks, we too might find that we possessed angelic talents, powers, and skills.” – Joseph Campbell

“The truth about us is sobering: We have been playing with our smart phones while hurtling toward the abyss…” – Sam Harris

Introduction

The flourishing of humanity depends on many mental and physical attributes, such as dexterous hands, abstract thought, communication ability and kin relations. If any of these characteristics vanished on a widespread scale, our quality of life would almost certainly regress. Although most traits foundational to human achievement are intact, a mental faculty indispensable to human progress is being catastrophically degraded.

Who’s in Control?

“The inner man has been created in the image of the outer.” – BF Skinner

“We live our lives, as it were, ‘inside out’, projecting the existence of an ‘I’ as separate from an external world which we try to manipulate to gain satisfaction.” – Namkhai Norbu

Introduction

Until better explanations became available, humans personified nature to explain its workings: gods with human looks and emotions have been invoked across cultures as causes behind natural processes, it was once believed that sperm housed little humans, and the mental faculty of foresight is often attributed to blind evolutionary processes that cannot anticipate future states. Fortunately, the scientific method has usurped much of the personified description of nature. Though we’ve realized personification’s inadequacy at explaining natural processes, the common understanding of our inner mental lives – themselves natural processes – hinges upon personification. We wrongly invoke personae (aka “selves”) as the causes behind human behaviour.[1] This oversimplification neglects the formative role of the environment on actions and mental states.