Vipassana meditation -Sensations?

Dr Paul Fleischman’s talks on Vipassana meditation are interesting for people who are new to meditation as well as for experienced meditators, as Dr. Fleischman combines insight from his personal experience as a meditator and Vipassana Teacher, and his professional knowledge as a psychiatrist.

The importance of using body sensations as the focus of meditative mindfulness is both convenient and essential. In the context of Vipassana, the term, “mindfulness,” specifically refers to awareness of body sensations as they arise and pass away.  Regarding convenience, first, we can quickly see that our own body sensations provide us a unique, personal focus for our meditation. It is as if we are attending to our own DNA, the unique patina of us. We have already seen that the body is the gateway into the mind. But now let’s make that point a little more emphatically. The body is the seat, the precondition-condition of mind. It is in our bodies that our mind takes up residence, and by meditating on our body, the deep basin within which our mind is located also becomes our focus. 

Another advantage to meditating on body sensations is that, generally speaking,our body is less well known to us than is our mind. The body is the locus of less conscious drives and forces, that nevertheless strongly influence us in our moment-to-moment living. These less conscious drives often determine directions that we take with our lives. Here I am referring to powerful somatic signals to which our minds are always subject, such as pain, sex, and the dissolution that we call aging and death. 

Meditation on body sensations provides a private, gradual entryway into the “dark side” of our being. Psychologically, we can say that the body contains aspects of ourselves that determine our nature, while at the same time we may be motivated to distance ourselves from them or deny them. Thus, strong signals from our body often constrain our choices though we have less conscious recognition of their origins. It is a skillful education to put ourselves in direct contact with the pre-verbal drives of embodied life. Our somatic being rises up into our full awareness, often like an unruly infant. Now the things I have said so far about sensations I would categorize as the convenient utility of meditating upon them. Using sensations as our meditative focus  gives us an eye-opening awareness of new dimensions of our selves. As important as these convenient aspects are, they are dwarfed by the essential insights that are generated by meditation upon the arising and passing of body sensations, and in order to plumb the depths of these insights, we need to spend a few moments discussing what body sensations actually are. 

The sensations of our body are all caused by the motions, signals, and responses, of the atomic, molecular, and cellular components that form us. We are made out of an aggregation of dynamically changing components, and it is the incessant change of everything within us that creates our world of sensations. 

The Buddha called the human being a compounded thing, and modern science emphatically agrees. Our bodies are aggregates of four components: matter, energy, information, and disarray. When our body takes shape in the uterus of our mother, matter and energy are packaged together according to certain information. A lot of our information is in the DNA that comes from our father and mother and that lives in all of our cells, and that provides instructions about how our body should run. 

But DNA is a large chemical, and therefore for it to do its job we must also contain the information by which chemistry organizes molecules out of atoms. The laws of the universe that we have labeled "chemistry," also dwell inside us and inform our being. And chemistry, in turn, rests upon the way that atoms create bonds, so that our bodies also contain the information of the universe that we call "physics." The laws that we have placed in conceptual compartments with names like "biology," "chemistry," and "physics," are all indwelling governors who regulate the atoms out of which we have been formed. We are a very large collection of moving, tiny parts, fluid and changing, following the laws of the universe that have formed us. 

Today we call these laws "information." Along with biology, chemistry, and physics, which all cooperate to organize us, we also contain entropy, disarray. Even as we are being built up from atoms, we are also constantly disorganizing and decaying. Eventually, the continuous remodeling which keeps us going succumbs to the loss of information which we call decay, and eventuates in death. But as long as we persist, we consist of constant creation and destruction, incessant change, which is observable to us as our body sensations. We are arenas of creation, dissolution, change. I have been describing to you an ultimate, biophysical cosmic truth that we can all observe (or partly observe) at the level of our own sensations. Even when we feel our socks itching our feet, or our behinds being crushed in the chair in this lecture hall, these ordinary, gross sensations are the product of changes in us, in our skin, in our sensory neurons, by which atoms and molecules are changing their location in order to relay information to our brain about what is going on in our feet or in our seat. Similarly, the new ideas that enter your mind as you listen to a lecturer come from new organizations of atoms in the cells of your brain, and create new sensations on your body as you listen. Many of our sensations are products of easy to understand dramatic changes in our body, but many are products of subtle thoughts and feelings that also influence our physical state. When we fully appreciate the pervasive reality of change in our selves we may accept (or partially accept) the reality that underlies our existence. Change lies within all things. There is no abiding self in our bodies or anywhere else. The term which the Buddha used when he awakened to these truths through Vipassana meditation was, "anicca," pervasive change in all compounded things. It always gives me pause when I consider that the Buddha discovered and gave emphasis to entropy more than two thousand years before Western science did. Allegedly, his last words began, "All compounded things decay.." Earlier, I mentioned that meditation needs to be understood not as a mental unit but as a large round corral holding many mental states within it. Now we can add that the perception of change is not a singular realization, but a common denominator to all perceptions of dynamism or alteration anywhere in the body and mind. Non-reactive observation enables us to gain this insight, and insight in turn feeds back into a more balanced world-view, so that awareness and equanimity reinforce each other. This is the heart of Vipassana meditation and its attendant way of life. I just want to pause for a moment and go a little further into a description of our bodies as collections of impermanent aggregates, because meditative experience and science fold into each other so supportively.

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