Abstract: Vipassana is an ancient meditation technique that will empower you to explore the deep interconnection between your mind and body. By paying disciplined attention to the physical sensations within your body, you can dissolve mental impurities and achieve a balanced mind filled with love and compassion. Vipassana is a thorough observational method that will make you more aware of your own experiences, leading you to newfound insight and understanding. With Vipassana, you will actively participate in observing your thoughts without getting caught up in them, enabling you to experience the truth behind the phenomena of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness. In general, it pursues three main goals: It allows you to get to know your inner self in-depth, clears the mind of old resentments and traumas, and releases noble and wholesome qualities from your subconscious.
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"The least dogmatic thing I ever encountered in life is Vipassana Meditation. I don't think I could have written any of my books without the help of the focus, the discipline, and the clarity that this kind of meditation gives. "
- Yuval Noah Harari
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Vipassana is a meditation technique that focuses on the deep interconnection between the mind and body. It allows you to experience this connection directly by paying disciplined attention to the physical sensations that occur within your body. This observation-based, self-exploratory journey helps you discover the common roots of the mind and body, dissolving mental impurities and resulting in a balanced mind filled with love and compassion.
Vipassana Meditation is a gentle yet thorough system utilized to train the mind. Through a set of exercises, it makes you more and more aware of your own experiences, enabling you to experience the world in a new and unique way. It leads you to the gift of insight and complete understanding, allowing you to truly comprehend what is happening both around and within you. You actively participate in observing your own experiences, learning to listen to your thoughts without getting caught up in them. The technique allows you to see the truth behind the phenomena of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness.
Vipassana Meditation is an ancient technique discovered more than 2500 years ago by Siddhartha Gautama, who is also known as Buddha. Buddha is not someone's name; it is a term that refers to someone who has attained wisdom, an ideal state of intellectual and ethical perfection that man can only achieve through pure means. Vipassana was taught by the Buddha as a universal tool called The Art of Living to eradicate mental impurities and liberate people from mental suffering, achieving ultimate happiness. The technique has been passed down to the present day via an unbroken chain of teachers, including the renowned S.N. Goenka.
THE AIM AND GOAL OF VIPASSANA MEDITATION
In modern society, every activity must have a clear aim or goal. Vipassana meditation, which is not an Olympic sport, cannot be monetised or used to win awards or financial gain, making those unsuitable as goals. Vipassana meditation is not a competitive activity, and one does not compete against others or oneself. As the sole shareholder of your mind, you only answer to yourself, which makes it challenging to find the motivation to persist. Meditation is not an end in itself, nor is it expected that people continue to practice it because it is trendy or because others do it. A good reason must exist for someone to meditate. So, what is the overall goal of Vipassana Meditation?
The most straightforward answer to this question is that it leads to joyfulness. Vipassana meditation helps to banish bad moods, psychological suffering, and misery. This it sims controversial since its implementation is a great challenge for the mind. Especially at the beginning, you may face unexpected obstacles.
However, once you start practising Vipassana regularly, you will begin to experience joy. At first only for short moments, but they will get longer and suddenly the joy will prevail.
But there are other reasons to persist. The meditation technique helps you accept reality as it is. You will be able to observe nature and its laws as they are, and not as one wants them to be. And here we come to another controversy. How does observing reality make you joyful, especially if reality is not as you want it to be? The answer is not easy to explain and needs to be experienced firsthand. The secret lies in reshaping your brain. Suddenly, things will become less fatal and will no longer negatively shape your understanding and thus your feelings and thoughts.
Some teachers say that the purpose of Vipassana meditation is to perfect all the noble and wholesome (healthy) qualities within the subconscious. In other words, the goal is to balance the mind to reach its full potential and achieve equanimity and happiness ultimately. To understand these aims, you need to reveal the wholesome qualities within your subconscious and work hard to develop them. This means that you need to get to know yourself better, which is a continuous process.
Vipassana meditation also offers more tangible, short-term goals. For example, you can work on reducing anger outbursts and lowering their intensity, which can be highly motivating. The best part is that you can monitor your progress, similar to how athletes evaluate their advancement. You can measure the response time, duration, or frequency of your anger.
To do this, you need to be aware that you are angry, which may not be so straightforward. You need to be mindful of your feelings. That is why mindfulness is another quality that Vipassana helps you develop. Once you become aware of the anger building up, take note of the time. Once the anger has passed, check the time again. If you meditate regularly, you will quickly realise that the amount of time you feel angry is getting shorter, and the frequency and intensity of your anger are decreasing. Being angry less often and with less intensity means you will experience less misery. "Only a miserable person can be angry" is another exhilarating insight that Vipassana meditation gives.
You can also measure progress in reducing stress, anxiety, and other adverse states. You can monitor how often you experience them, how long they last, and how severe the episodes are. By practising Vipassana meditation regularly, you will notice that these negative emotions will decrease.
It is essential to avoid becoming obsessive about monitoring progress. This can lead to frustration and disappointment and have a negative effect. Therefore, all these measurements should be taken with a grain of salt, only as initial motivation and nothing more.
And finally, yet importantly, Vipassana meditation needs to be looked at more broadly. A balanced mind, reduction in suffering, and achieving personal happiness are significant individual accomplishments that also benefit the community. Therefore, society should implement meditation as an integral part of everyday life and as an essential individual ability and a respected value. Becoming a meditative person, a non-biased observer of reality, should not just be a privilege but a necessity for everyone if we want to progress as individuals and as a society.
