Meditating

in Troubled Times

by Paul R. Fleischman

(transcript of a talk given in Cologne, Germany in 2017)

I'm going to talk to you about Vipassana as a path through a world of uncertainty. Today
many people feel that they live in a time of trouble. Last year, I gave a series of lectures
around the United States, which was about the biological basis of meditation, how
meditation actually works in your body and your brain. And when I Minished that lecture
series I was so interested in the biology, which is one of my main interests, that I decided
that next year - that is to say this year - I would give an even more detailed, intricate talk
about the actual biology of what happens to you when you meditate, and why meditation
feels so healing, helpful, and natural.

But one November day in 2016, I realized no one would be interested in that talk.
Everybody had one thing on their mind, and that was: “something is troubling us”.
Something is troubling us as individuals, and something is troubling us as a global
community. Of course as a Vipassana teacher in the tradition of S.N. Goenka I can neither
change or even address all the global issues, or the political issues, or the social issues. So
my job this afternoon will be to discuss how meditation can help us live and be a path in a
world of uncertainty.

And I'm going to say that it can give us guidance, Mlexibility and steadiness. Some of those
are slightly different - Mlexibility and steadiness are almost opposite, and yet I'm going to try
to tell you that meditation can help us in all those directions.

A very brief review of the biology of meditation would tell you that meditation activates
pathways that already exists inside of us. In the ancient way of talking about things, we
would say, “you are born with the seed of Dhamma,” and in the modern way of talking about
things we would say inside of the human body, inside of our nervous system, inside of our
endocrine system, are pathways to peace, wisdom, sociability and transcendent feelings
that can guide us towards an excellent way of life. Those are already built into us, and
meditation is the teaching about how to activate and optimally use what we are born with
as Homo sapiens.

The Mirst thing to remember when we confront a troubling world is that we are born with
the ability to return to the feeling of peace. The feeling of peace exists inside of us. It is a
product of the way the nervous system can be coded. And our minds, our teaching, our
lessons, our practice in meditation can help us constantly restore this feeling of inner peace.
I use the phrase “inner peace”, Goenkaji uses the difMicult English word “equanimity”, and
I'm just taking the word equanimity and making an easier term: inner peace. Let's
remember how we are taught that our inner peace works, using the traditional teaching,

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the older language not the modern biology. When our thoughts and feelings rise up in our
mind, typically, we just believe in our thoughts and feelings, and react to the world as our
thoughts and feelings tell us to react.

When we learn to meditate, we learn to observe our minds and our bodies. We learn to
observe all our thoughts and all our emotions at the basis of the sensations that those
thoughts and emotions create on the body. The sensations help to cause our thoughts and
our emotions. The sensations both cause our thoughts and emotions, and our reactions to
our thoughts and emotions. Our body, not just our mind, is alive with our thoughts and
emotions, and by learning to observe the sensations rather than reacting to the sensations,
or believing simply in the thoughts and emotions, we come to be observers of the reality
that underlies everything we think and feel. And that reality is that we live inside of a
changing matrix of tiny little things. We are clouds of temporary aggregates.

The Buddha taught all things that are in this phenomenal world are impermanent. In
modern science we say that our bodies are aggregates of tiny things. Depending on what
level of analysis we use, we say “atoms” or “subatomic particles,” or “sub-subatomic
particles.” We are aggregates of these things, and all aggregates follow the laws of entropy,
so our bodies and minds will all pass away. This is the teaching of the Buddha. It's also the
teaching of the physics class that will be taught in this building after we leave here today.

So inner peace comes into our focus when we learn to observe the basic reality that
underlies our existence, and that basic reality is our transience and our impermanence.

But science doesn't teach us how to live with that reality in a way that is transcendent. That
is, we can move beyond the mere sorrow, the mere dukkha, the mere loss that life brings to
us because life brings transience and decay and disappearance. But the path of the Buddha
is different from science in that it teaches us how to generate emotions that give meaning to
life, that make our life feel valuable, precious and directed, even though our life is
impermanent and will pass away. So as students of the Buddha, we are following the
modern science of entropy, but we're also following the ancient wisdom of the Path of the
Buddha that teaches us to Mind something more than impermanence and transience.

Cultivating inner peace is easy because it is already coded into us. If you take a neurology
course, you learn about things like the hypothalamus, which is a part of the brain that sets
all of our body functions in motion, even when we're at total rest: when you go to sleep you
don't stop breathing. Our body is built for total rest. We also have other parts of our
nervous system like the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a part of our set up, our
hardware, that enables us to relax very deeply.

At the same time, learning inner peace is also very difMicult. I'm afraid that if I say to a group
of old students that cultivating inner peace feels natural and easy, that I'll get stoned -

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people will start throwing things at me - because it's also very difMicult. It's difMicult because
we have an adaptive system that teaches us peace and calm, but it also teaches us survival
strategies. We are not only built to sleep at night, we are built to cope in the daytime. And
the more signals that come in to challenge your survival during a day, the more stirred up
your nervous system becomes.

If you're living in a world in which you feel threatened, your nervous system will respond,
heightening the signals of adaptation, telling you to do more, strive more, try harder to
survive. Even the best life, even the easiest life still has some challenges and some threats,
and so on the one hand, we are built for inner peace, and on the other hand we are built for
struggle, strategizing, thinking, planning, doing, and not relaxing, not being at peace. So
there are two competing agendas, and when we sit down to meditate we sit down with the
motive to be at peace with ourselves, and instead we Mind a hundred thousand thoughts and
day dreams, and fears, and wishes, and plans, craving for pleasant things to happen,
strategizing for pleasant things to happen, and craving that unpleasant things don't happen,
strategizing to prevent unpleasant things happening.

Generally, the teaching of meditation is about how we can overcome, or reduce at least, if
not overcome, some of the old wounds, fears, injuries, doubts and troubles that we bring
with us when we arrive at the doorstep of the 10-day course. So meditation helps us to not
be living in the past, but be living in the present, but sometimes the present feels very
difMicult, and it feels as if even if we've overcome our past Illusions and delusions, our past
sankharas, even if we overcome them, we're still in a world that stimulates us to feel a sense
of threat, because the world feels insecure and uncertain.

Up until a few years ago I was very reluctant to give old student talks. There is really not
much need for old student talks in our tradition. When I was appointed by Goenkaji to have
a speciMic job as a teacher, the job that he gave to me and to Susan was to talk about
Vipassana to professionals and intellectuals in the West who didn't know about meditation.
We were interpreters. Otherwise the Dhamma is already complete. Goenkaji has given us
the full teaching. There's nothing to be added. So there's no need for an old student talk.
Furthermore, if you have forgotten what you learned, you can just go back and take another
course, or now you can just get the discourses from a website.

So what is the point of an old student talk? Why are we giving this old student talk this
afternoon? And why have I given a few other old student talks? It seems that as times
change, a few very small points of clarity are needed due to the changing times. One point
of clarity is how people can establish a twice daily practice in a world that is so speedy,
technological, crowded and noisy as our modern world. I've given an old student talk on
that topic which you can Mind on Pariyatti. But today's talk was stimulated by a different
issue, and that is the issue of feeling that we live in trouble times, and a question arises in

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many people's minds: will meditation help me if the issue is not simply overcoming my past
sankharas; what if it's the present circumstances that are troubling me? Will meditation
still be relevant? Other people worry: is meditation just a way to calm yourself down, and
should you really calm yourself down? Should you really feel at peace when you feel wrong
things are happening in the world around you? Shouldn't you not be at peace? So this talk is
stimulated by a speciMic request by local teachers here to give a talk on speciMic issues. In
general we can remember that old student talks are not always necessary, but occasionally
the question comes up, as now, what do we do in this time of trouble?

One thing to think about is that when we meditate ,and we feel some equanimity, some
inner peace, we are purifying a small patch of planet Earth. The image that came to me this
morning - I wrote it down on the side of the paper, it just came to me this morning - there
are these electronic air puriMiers. If you live in a polluted city, you can buy one of these
things. It's got a Milter and you plug it into the electricity; a little fan pushes the air through
the Milter and it puriMies the air. It doesn't purify the city, it just puriMies the air in one room.
That is what is happening when you're meditating here, just purifying the air of one room.
It is a pretty small accomplishment and it doesn't change the planet but it still does lead to
some pure air in that city.

There is another thing to think about though, on the issue of inner peace, and whether it's
even a right thing to strive for in a world of harmfulness and trouble, and that is that much
of what we are feeling as toxic, much of the difMiculty that is coming in towards us, much of
what is stimulating us to feel frightened or angry or threatened, much of that comes
through the news media, and the news media creates a frame. Literally it's a frame. It's a
picture frame, and inside that picture frame some information is placed. Typically people
are watching television, and getting visual and verbal information that is compacted inside
of a small frame. If you're watching on a computer it’s the same thing, a small frame of
information.

The world, this planet that we live on, is 4 billion years old; human beings are about
150,000 years old. Our culture as we understand it is several thousand years old. It was a
great pleasure for me to read that this city, Cologne, is 2,000 years old, founded by the
Romans.When we think about the news, it's almost entirely ahistorical - it focuses on
something that has just happened. Every day it's changed, and almost every day what was
said before is forgotten and pushed aside so that intense excitement is kept alive, and the
frame is always very immediate and very narrow.

So one thing you can do, that I recommend, is to ask yourself how much you are exposing
yourself to an artiMicial, intentionally framed, intentionally formatted, controlled source of
visual and cognitive information that you don't need. What would happen to you if you
listened to one hour of news per week? Would you really become a socially irresponsible

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citizen? Or would you become better informed because in the time that you were not
watching television, or looking at your news source on the computer, you would actually be
using your brain to Mind different sources of information, alternative sources, historical
sources.

There is a professor at MIT. He's a professor of international strategy. He studies nuclear

weapons - a very daring life to keep thinking about nuclear weapons for your whole life. His
name is Professor Gavin. He's at MIT - you can look him up. He has a website, and an essay
on his website is called “Thinking Historically”, and he uses an example: all the policy
makers of the world, all the heads of state, all the chiefs of state, all the generals, all the
nuclear strategists, all the paciMists, were thinking that the world would go in a certain way,
and completely off frame, uncovered by the news, in secrecy, intentional secrecy, the world
was most radically altered in our times by the invention of the iPhone. So the news that you
are reading about, listening to, and thinking about is not the most important information.
And you might challenge yourself to ask how much you are allowing yourself to be
controlled and misinformed. As meditators our job is to live with reality as it is.

Another difMiculty that meditators may be suffering from or may wisely avoid, is what is
called vicarious traumatization. If you come up and stab me, I'll not only have a wound but
I'll feel traumatized. I'll feel like I gave a talk and some crazy person ran up and stabbed me
and now I feel traumatized. I won’t know who I can trust. So I have the mental wound as
well as a physical wound. But if I have not been stabbed, and I just see somebody stab
somebody else, nothing happened to me, it's not my problem, but I'll still feel vicariously
traumatized. I watched you get stabbed, and that trauma is conveyed to me even though it
didn't happen to me. Television is intentionally traumatizing you by forcing you to watch
traumas that are happening to other people, which you could easily learn about through
non-visual media that would not be exposing you to traumatization.

A number of years ago I heard one of the great experts in the United States, Dr. Lenore Terr.
She's a child psychiatrist, an older woman, one of the great Migures in the study of trauma
and children. And she asked a group of psychiatrists: “Now how many of you watched the
terrible events of 9/11 on television”? Almost everybody raised their hand. Fortunately for
me, I did not raise my hand. Lenore Terr said, “I have never seen it. I would never allow
myself to be exposed to a television image repeating over and over, and over and over, a
visual image of trauma - that's going to traumatize you.” Fortunately for me, I don't own a
television, and so I have one less vicarious trauma than almost everyone else in the world.

Once again, you can ask yourself, whether your meditation practice, whether your gift to
the world, which is your meditation, is really being enhanced by your exposure to the
media. Are you are watching news to be a more informed citizen, or are you are allowing
yourself to be drawn away from the greatest gift you have to give, which is the inner peace

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that you generate, that can at least detoxify and purify at least one room? And depending, as
we'll discuss more during the rest of this talk, hopefully you will be generating feeling states
that will detoxify a lot more than one room.

I talked about the fact of how old our planet is, how old our species is, how we are
inheritors of 150,000 to 200,000 years of experience within our species alone, and four
billion years of evolution of life. And that experience is inside of our biology, inside of our
nervous system, and it is through that we can have the wisdom to be meditators. But there's
another issue of perspective that we can think about that will help free us from some of the
fears that are being fed to us by the small frame that compacts information that we don't
necessarily need or want.

I started out by saying these are troubled times, which they certainly are. But these are not
hard times. These are easy times. It's important, I think, that when we talk among our
friends, or when we think to ourselves, that we do not use the inMlated, exaggerated, hyper
language that the news media creates for us. These are not hard times. What's an example
of hard times? Well, I was born in 1945. I was born just a couple of days before the United
States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the ten years before those
nuclear attacks, the ten years that preceded my personal taking birth, 1935 to 1945,
approximately Mifty to eighty million people were killed by other people. Fifty to eighty
million.

The exact numbers are unknown because there were so many people being killed no one
could possibly count them. For example when China was invaded by Japan no one was
counting how many people were killed. In the sieges of Soviet cities nobody was counting
how many people were killed. Sometimes whole cities starved. No one knew how many
people disappeared, so the numbers Mifty to eighty million are estimates, but no one doubts
that it's less than Mifty million. There are historians who try to reconstruct these Migures. The
Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million human beings in one country.

Those were hard times. These are not hard times. So we want to remember and constantly
remind ourselves that, in facing our troubles, we shouldn't exaggerate them or imagine that
we are unique in the human condition. The human condition requires us to be able to face
difMiculties. There are always difMiculties, and those of us who have lived after 1945, we've
been generally very lucky. Probably everyone in this room has to count themselves as very
lucky. I count myself as very lucky.

War has not been the only vector that has led to mass death. A Harvard historian of disease
has pointed out smallpox was eradicated in the twentieth century. We believe there's no
more smallpox left on the planet. It only lasted till about 1970. But between 1900 and 1970
about 300 million people died of smallpox. I'll bet none of them got to meditate.

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Once again, keeping a perspective on the frame, the small frame, and moving your
perspective out to the big frame will certainly help you to remember the good fortune you
have to live in the times we do, and to be able to meditate and practice some inner peace.

Another feature, another perspective to keep in mind, is that we live in the era of
globalization, a term that is beloved and hated. It's supposed to be our salvation and our
biggest problem. I'm not taking a political or economic side about globalization, but the fact
is in our times things have become globalized. I've got a watch in front of me, and a watch
on my wrist and those watches came from China. When I go into a store in the United States
to buy something, it's always made in China. Everybody knows that we live in the era of
globalization whether we like it or not, but it's not just products that are globalized, it's
ideas that are globalized, and one of the ideas that went global in our times was meditation.

When I was born, meditation did not exist in the Western Hemisphere. There was no place
in the United States, there was no place in Germany where you could learn how to meditate.
Now when I walk into the food store where we shop - it’s a kind of health food store - you
almost have to Might your way through the magazines that are telling you how to be a
meditator, how to be mindful, how to practice yoga. All of that happened within our lifetime,
or within my lifetime, just before some of you were born or since many of you were born. So
another perspective to keep in mind is that we live in a time in which the very idea of being
peaceful, and living at peace, has become available. Before that, life was understood in the
West without that concept.

Whether you feel these are the best of times because we have longevity, pretty good
physical health, and a chance to meditate, or whether you feel these are the worst of times
because of the sense of threat in the air, the fragmentation of the relative harmony and the
relative stability with which we've lived for so long, whether you feel the best of times or
the worst of times around you, these are our only times. We are born now.

These are the times for us to meditate. So to look upon these times and say, “I can't meditate
because I'm being challenged by my historical era”, is to misunderstand meditation. Instead,
meditation is to say these are the challenges that I have been given to meditate with. It's
just like when we meditate on our own sankharas, we can't sit there and say I don't want
this sankhara. I want that sankhara that the guy over there has. I want to get rid of mine;
mine are too hard. I'll bet his are easier. We all are taught that we can't think that way, so we
can't think that way about our historical era. Instead we need to rotate our perspective and
understand this is our good fortune to face these challenges with our Dhamma wisdom.

When we meditate, we're taught to Mind clarity of mind, a mind that sees things realistically,
as they are. And that clarity helps us to feel sensations, and feel increasingly subtle and
various sensations throughout all of our body. Our minds become clearer, and we can feel

7
sensations everywhere, and different kinds of sensations, and the change in the sensations,
and we can understand the meaning of the sensations: that everything is change.

But the clarity that we cultivate in a life of meditation is not just mental. There's a feedback
loop. Those of you who are biologists, or doctors, or in health care, or those of you who are
engineers - which I think means about 61 million Germans - whether you're an engineer or
a biologist, you understand that feedback loops - causes that feedback upon themselves and
self-regulate – feedback loops are the secret of stability. Our body is built with literally
thousands, or tens of thousands, of feedback loops that regulate our temperature, our heart
rate, our endocrine system, and how many cells we produce, how many cells we allow to
die off. And in most engineering systems we have feedback loops that limit the amount of
electricity that will Mlow through a system at any point in time, limit how long a certain part
of the system will remain activated. So feedback loops are happening when we meditate,
and those feedback loops when we meditate are inMluenced by our body because we
observe our body as we meditate, but we are inMluencing our body as we meditate.

We're taught that we can't choose sensations. In a ten-day course, we don't choose the
sensations. We simply observe without judging whatever arises. But in a life of meditation,
we deMinitely change our sensations, because our awareness, our clarity, our practice,
teaches us, guides us to live in ways that change the way our sensations are generated. For
example, every person who meditates seriously changes his or her diet. There's no one diet
that is right for all meditators. Every person has to Mind his or her own correct diet, but
when you become a meditator, the Mirst thing you begin to notice is the sensations of your
gastrointestinal tract differ depending upon what you eat, and you can create stress, or you
can reduce the stress in your gastrointestinal tract by the way you eat. All meditators
become more sensitive to their diet, their activity level, their manner of dressing, even
where they live, even what job they choose to work at. So meditation is inducing clarity
through clarity. Clarity is a feedback loop that produces clarity. As you clarify the way you
observe your sensations, and as you clarify your mind so that you can observe sensations
objectively without trying to change them, you will generate a lifestyle that does change
them. This will help you establish yourself in a feeling of peace that follows you around in
your body and is not just in your mind.

And it may be that this physical clarity that you generate is also like that air puriMier that I
mentioned earlier, which may purify only a small part of the world, but does purify the air
of your room. And so your body is self-purifying, and may generate some purity in the
world around you, which other people may pick up on.

The Mive sila, the Mive moral vows that we take when we start a course, are intended initially
to give us minimum mental clarity so that we can meditate. If we're thinking of stealing or
lying, we are not going to be peaceful enough and harmonious enough to observe our

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bodies and meditate. So we take a vow not to do those things. But if you live a life of those
sila, of those moral vows, they are changing the clarity of your mind all the time.

If they're not just a mental activity, they become an activity that changes your mind and
your body, because by changing your mind you're changing your body. So that is another
feedback loop you're creating, which is changing yourself and the way you interact with the
world. The sila is not only changing your actions, it's not only changing your thoughts, but
it's changing your body because it's changing your actions and your thoughts.

When you start out as a psychiatrist, you're very junior, you get all the hard work. The older
you get, the easier it gets. One difMicult problem I had as a younger psychiatrist was that I
sometimes - not very often but occasionally - had to go into psychiatric hospitals and
evaluate psychotic murderers, people who had not only murdered but they were not
realistic people, they were out of their minds and their murder had not been caused by
something that would serve some belief or goal, just psychotic belief and then a murder.

The Mirst time I went into a room with a psychotic murderer, a friend of mine, an older more
experienced person, leaned over to me and said. “be careful what you say.” I hadn't planned
to not be careful, but I had gotten some guidance about how to deal with people like that,
not from a psychiatrist, but from a drug addict. One of my Mirst patients was a chronic
opium addict, someone who's addicted to opiates and would get arrested, get imprisoned,
come out of prison, addicted again, sent to prison, come out of prison, addicted again. He
was a chronic addict.

And this is what he said to me about dealing with opiate addicts, and it applies to psychotic
murderers as well. He said: “Listen, no matter what a person has done, no matter how bad
they've been in the past, no matter how bad they feel they are, no matter how guilty or
guiltless they feel, one thing everybody wants is they want to feel respected. Just don't
disrespect these people.”

So every time I go into a room with a psychotic murderer, on my mind would be: tell me
your viewpoint. I'm going to listen to your point of view. I didn't say I'm going to believe
your point of view. I said I'm going to listen to it. I'm going to respect it, which is different
than believing it.

Unfortunately, I feel that we now live in an era in which disrespect is the way that public
communication is happening. Instead of debates, the so-called “debates” that are on
television are forms of theater that specialize in taunting, mockery, and disrespect -
contempt and derision are what win a debate.

One of the reasons I've lived a pretty good life is that I've been under the thumb of an
elementary school educator. That's my wife. When you go to elementary school in the
United States - and I'm sure this is at least as true in Germany - you're taught you can't say

9
hostile and disrespectful things to the other children. That’s called bullying. Now I'm not
saying bullying doesn't exist. Of course, it does exist. But we're at least taught not to do that,
or at least taught that hostile, disrespectful speech is not proper. It's not allowed. You can't
do it in front of the teacher. Maybe you can get away with it on the playground.

But among adults we've dropped below the third-grade level. We're not living up to the
third-grade level. Now in the Vipassana community we need to stick to the third-grade
level. And the third-grade level is that the teacher tells us: don't use hostile and
disrespectful speech. So we're practicing creating a world among ourselves in the Vipassana
community of psychological safety. Psychological safety means when you talk to me, I can
feel safe. Psychological safety does not mean always agreeing with people. It means
disagreeing when you disagree. But disagreeing in a respectful way. Instead of attacking the
person, you disagree with their argument. So when you're listening to a psychotic
murderer, you don't say: “I agree. It was a good thing that you stabbed your mother to
death.” But you do say: “I understand that you felt it was necessary to attack your mother,
but I want you to know I disagree that was a good thing to do.”

Psychological safety means something about the tone of voice. A tone of voice is different
than what you say: it's how you say it. We need to cultivate a tone of voice that is respectful.
If we cultivate this attitude in our Dhamma community, we can then feel stronger in
cultivating this tone of voice outside of our Dhamma community, in our daily interactions
with people who we disagree with.

One of the things I've noticed is that among my friends in the United States, when people
disagree with a political position, they always feel that they themselves have the right to
ridicule and demean the other people. The progressives, the liberals, ridicule and demean
the conservatives for using ridiculing and demeaning speech. It's a vicious cycle.

I think that respect is part of our Vipassana way of life, and we should observe ourselves to
make sure that we're not participating in this worldwide cycle of feeling: “I have the right to
disrespect that other person because that other person is disrespecting other people.” My
drug addict patient, the one who taught me, don't disrespect anybody and you'll be safe
even in the company of murderers, he taught me one additional point. He said - and now
I'm going to use some American (American is a different language than English. And
actually my native language is American) - so he said: “Don't bullshit anybody. If you
disagree with somebody, let them know you disagree with them. If you pretend that you
agree with someone like a psychotic murderer, if you're so nice to them, so pretentiously
sympathetic, they will immediately know that you're bullshitting and they'll distrust you.
They know you're hiding something. They know you really think something else.”

Our job is to speak honestly - right speech is honest speech, and right speech is respectful
speech: how to say: “I disagree with you. I think you're wrong”, in a way that is different

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than saying something contemptuous, demeaning, or in American, we say putting someone
down. Hopefully the equanimity, or the inner peace, that we generate when we meditate
will help us speak more calmly, honestly and respectfully.

There's a feeling that happens when you meditate that I Mind somewhat strange. Lots of
times I go into a course myself, I sit there, and this storm comes up, this storm comes up,
this storm comes up. And if you ask me on day 29 of a 30-day course, “What's it been like?”
it’s, “Man it's really hard”. And then when the course is over you feel so much reverence for
life, for your own life, for the lizards crawling around if you're meditating in India. This
reverence is an automatic happening that happens to people who meditate. But it's not
unique to meditators. Almost all children have a feeling of reverence. Almost all children
look around at the stars, or grass, or animals in the zoo, or animals that they see, and have
some intuition that we have been born into a world that pre-exists us, and out of which we
have sprang, and this world is to be revered. The impermanence of our own life is the
greatest reminder that we have for the reverence for all of life. We see ourselves
surrounded by simple great gifts of life itself, and often when we Minish a meditation course,
we feel we don't need anything other than what we have. That is we feel wealthy, spiritually
wealthy.

All that we know about meditation is taught to us by other people. Meditation is a gift that
we get. It's a skill that we learn that other people teach to us. So we've inherited the wealth
of our life from the biology and physics of the world, and we've inherited the wealth of
meditation from the people before us who've understood, taught and practiced meditation.
That means when we are with reality, reality is that we have a feeling of reverence. And so
the best measure of a feeling of how realistic you are is a feeling of reverence, and this is a
feeling that children have, that we can remind other people that they have had. People who
are walking around feeling angry have forgotten something.

When I took my Mirst Vipassana course, I felt uncomfortable with the term “purity”. We're
taught that Vipassana is to purify ourselves. And I think that's correct - Vipassana is to
purify ourselves. But the word, “purity,” in American is not a very good word. It's associated
with things like when you're in high school people say: “don't curse!”. It's a kind of a Puritan
word. It's a word about being very conMined and goody-goody. So I've been looking for years
to Mind a better way to express what the Buddha taught which is puriMication. That's
technically correct, but it doesn't sound right to the American ear, and I don't know how it
sounds when it's translated into German, or when Germans listen to English.

Instead of using the word purity, I wonder if I change my manner of thinking about it to
“goodness of heart”. It's very important for us to keep in mind this feeling of “goodness of
heart”, or you could say “puriMication”. There are many kinds of meditation today that are
very good: we should never be condemning other people's meditation. We should never be

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saying ours is better, or you're not getting the real teaching, we’re getting the real teaching,
because that only makes you a self-righteous person, just another religious bigot.

But we should know what we're doing and why were doing it, and what the meaning of why
we're doing what we're doing is, so that we can value what we're doing, and so that we can
explain it without disrespecting anything else. Just by explaining we're not disrespecting. So
puriMication, or goodness of heart, is the goal that the Buddha gave to meditation, and that
means it's different than being here in the now, or being aware of what you're doing, or
being mindful of what you're doing. Those are not our goals. Our goal is the path of
puriMication. Now, why is that so important?

Well, Mirst place it does mean that Vipassana meditation is a progressive Path. We aim to
make progress. It is not simply being here now. We don't want to be sitting in the same
puddle ten years from now that we're sitting in now. But even more importantly, the
progressive atmosphere of the Path, the movement towards goodness of heart, the
intention to purify our heart, means that every day is an opportunity with a direction. I said
at the beginning that science teaches us about entropy, science teaches us that this whole
world, everything, me, all my thoughts, everyone I know, this building, this planet, all of it
will disappear. Why be attached to it? Science teaches me that, but science does not teach
me how to attain goodness of heart. Goodness of heart is the Path of puriMication, or the
Path of the teaching of the Buddha, and we want to keep in mind when we listen to the
world around us, that we are trying to move our life in a particular direction. And when
information is coming in that is toxifying our mind, our job is to try to Mind a way to keep
our own goodness of heart.

One problem this can produce, though, is perfectionism. We don't want to expect that in this
lifetime each one of us is going to become the Buddha. We don't even want to expect that in
this lifetime we will be as perfected as other people around us. We may always be more or
less who we are, just the better edition, the better version of who we are, but we're always
moving in a direction that we never lose. So on the one hand we should avoid attitudes of
perfectionism that may make us feel that we're not good enough, which is generating
negativity towards ourselves. On the other hand we should keep in mind that today is an
opportunity.

There are many courageous, big-hearted people in this world, and there are many not-so-
Mine people in this world. If we meditate, and we feel that we're better than the other
courageous, brave, good-hearted, kind, generous, noble people in this world, then our
meditation is making us into vain, self-promoting people. So what is the point of meditating
if the world is already Milled with beautiful, great people who may be as good or much better
than any one of us? The point of meditating is that we are people who have chosen to
meditate. This is the Path for us. We've selected it. We don't have to disrespect people who

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are lesser. We don't have to claim to be better than other people, who may be far ahead of
us and who have never heard of meditation. What we need to keep in mind is that for some
reason we've selected this manner of growth, and this manner of growth has certain very
excellent features. It's clear, we can practice it. We've tried it out and it's worked for us. We
know it will help us because we've already had that experience. We are walking the Path for
reasons based upon our own experience, knowing we are on the Path of puriMication, or the
Path of goodness of heart. And we can refrain from comparing ourselves to others, and we
can refrain from the false vanity of feeling we are better than others.

There's an American writer who I greatly admire, who said that a rich person is a person
who can afford to leave things aside. Like, a rich man has 10 cars. He doesn't need an 11th
car. That's a pretty good deMinition of wealth. But there's a better deMinition of wealth, which
comes from the teaching of the Buddha: the richest person is the person who has the most
to give away. The path of goodness of heart is a path of wealth.

You want to know if you're practicing correctly. If you're getting richer in goodness of heart,
you have more to give away. Bill Gates gives away a couple of billion, but he's still got 40
billion. He’s not giving away that much. Our Path is a path in which we try to give away
more and more, not money, of course, but from our hearts, so the Path of goodness of heart
is a path of having a wealthy heart.

Most of us are walking towards the direction of self-puriMication, goodness of heart, which
is the direction of nibbana as taught by the Buddha. Nibbana means so pure that there's no
negativity left, but most of us are pretty far from that point.

Like many meditators, at times I've developed a negativity of discouragement, thinking:

“Wow. I've got so many sankharas when I meditate, and the Buddha says you're going to be
free of all sankharas. It doesn't look like that's going to happen to me.” As you've noticed, I
like to make up words. So I made up a word that helps me. No, I'm going in the direction of
nibbana, even if I'm not that far in that direction. And that word is nanonibbana. Let’s all be
sure we're walking in the direction of nanonibbana.

I want to praise loneliness. Loneliness is generally experienced as a negativity. When we

feel lonely, we feel, “Oh, this is awful. I want to get rid of this.” We think of loneliness as
something we want to cast aside and be rid of. And one of the beauties of the Path of
Dhamma, the Path of Vipassana, is that the Buddha taught that friendship is one hundred
percent of the Path. Friendship with the good and the wise is one hundred percent of the
Path. So to be on the Path, and to be with others on the Path, that's the Path.

Even if you're far from nibbana, and you're only working with nanonibbana, if you're
working with the Path, and friendly with others on the Path, you're on the Path. So the Path
is a Path of friendship and comradeship. And yet the Path is a Path of loneliness.

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Let's think about the life of the Buddha. He left! He was - this is a legend of course - he was
in a castle, surrounded by his family, that means parents, wife and child, and he left to be
alone. And in the legend he leaves with his charioteer and eventually he abandons his
charioteer. The Path for the Buddha was a Path that required some loneliness.

Then when he was Mirst practicing, before he became the Buddha, he was practicing in a
community of friends, and they left. And he was in loneliness again. There's a sutta, that is
translated into English as the “Rhinoceros Sutta”, in which the Buddha says the correct way,
sometimes the correct way to practice is like an old rhinoceros wandering alone in the
jungle. Rhinoceroses are very solitary animals, so they wander alone. Now if this is a Path of
friendship, then why is it also a Path of loneliness? When you sit down - and those of you
who have had an experience in a cell, then you know this more dramatically, but even if
you're just meditating on any 10-day course, you know - you are walking the Path alone. It
is you who are walking the Path. And you are the only person who can walk the Path for
yourself. And therefore the Path is also a Path that requires the ability to value loneliness.

When we look at our social problems...sometimes I look around at the things that are
happening in the world and I feel I'm the loneliest person who ever lived. I don't hear any
voices, I don't read many voices of people who I agree with. The more you think for
yourself, the more lonely you're going to be. The best way to be not lonely is to join a herd,
is to think like everybody else. When you see these demagogues, and they are surrounded
by a cheering multitude, the cheering multitude is escaping from their loneliness by having
one thought.

When Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for literature this year, he didn't attend the ceremony,
but he gave a speech for someone else to deliver. He wrote it out. And he said it's easier to
play a concert for 50,000 people, than a concert for 50 people, because once you have
50,000 people together, they just become one person. They all cheer at the same thing; they
all cry at the same thing. They're not lonely anymore. But 50 people, each one is thinking
for himself, and if you play the wrong note, they'll go: “Hey, that guy's playing the wrong
note on his guitar.”

In the Rhinoceros Sutta the Buddha said - and this is a translation into English - renouncing
violence, seeing the drawbacks of social allurement, the wise person, valuing freedom,
wanders alone like a rhinoceros.

Strangely enough, the precursor to true friendship is loneliness. True friendship means two
people who understand each other pretty well. We never understand even ourselves - when
we meditate we are aware that there's so much inside of us. A lot of our self is unknown to
ourselves, but we come to understand ourselves pretty well, and to have a friend means to
have a person who understands you pretty well and you understand them pretty well. So if
you've never been lonely, if you've never thought about yourself, if you've never understood

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yourself, if you've never meditated deeply and come to see who you are, how can you have a
real friend? So the path to friendship leads through loneliness. I invented an expression that
says: “If you're not lonely, then you haven't got a friend.”

Goenkaji died in 2013, and we've all been thinking about what we've gotten from him. I've
said that we're standing in a much bigger perspective than the news gives us. We're
standing in a much bigger perspective than our own life. We are standing in the perspective
of the biggest picture that science or Dhamma gives to us. And Goenkaji was the funnel, the
focal point through which we got the practice of Vipassana. He gave us many gifts. He was
an exceptionally wealthy human being. One of the gifts that he gave, that I think about a lot,
is the gift that he gives during a course. He gives it over and over and over - after a while
you begin to think, “Hey, leave me alone!” He goes, “Begin again,” and you're thinking, “I
don't want to begin again!” I want to get out of here. And he goes, “Begin again, begin again,
begin again.”

Now he's gone. And we have to live our life constantly beginning again. There are times
when every intelligent, thoughtful, heartfelt person will feel doubt. Doubt is part of human
existence, and it is transcended only towards the end.

Sometimes people say they feel no doubt, and that simply means they're stubborn or
bigoted. The thoughtful person looks around the world and feels challenged. But Goenkaji
gave us the key teaching, which is also found in the original suttas. The Buddha said the
number one virtue - it's more important than all the paramis because all the paramis rest
upon this virtue - is the parami of diligence. Diligence means, “Begin again.” So our teaching
can't exist, and is valueless, without that one phrase, and through the rest of our lives we
will have to begin again. The people who beneMit from Vipassana are the people who know
two words, “Begin again.” And the people who leave the Path are the people who didn't
understand those two words.

There is an expression in psychiatry. The expression is the word “internalization.” When a

child learns something, Mirst a child imitates, but after a while, if imitation is carried on over
time, the child internalizes. Grammar is internalized; vocabulary is internalized. I can use
my one and only language without thinking about it. I don't have to Migure out how to
construct a sentence. It's internalized. Everybody knows when they're learning a language
that there's a certain point at which you're constantly faking it, you're constantly struggling
to say something; and then another point comes along when you're actually speaking the
language. It has become internalized. You may not speak it perfectly but you have
internalized it.

We want to keep meditating until it's internalized. I cannot think without using the English
language. When I sit down to think, my mind moves along in English. I cannot live without
meditating. Our goal is to meditate, to begin again, to begin again, until meditation is

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internalized in our brain, and when we lie down to go to sleep at night we’re meditating;
wake up in the morning, we’re meditating, because it's already been internalized in our
neurology, the way our grammar has been.

Meditation is an act of faith in the value of life. Every day our lives, if we're meditators, is a
challenge to live by the Dhamma - and it's not easy. The world is not supporting us. The
world is challenging us and presenting us with difMiculties. We don't want to be thinking:
“This is unfair. I got a bad deal. I should have been born in the 12th century. Bubonic plague
was a lot more fun.” Instead, we want to be thinking: “This is my life. These are my times. I
was born now. These are my challenges. My Dhamma needs to be good enough to work
with these challenges.”

It is true that darkness surrounds us, and that's why we have come to seek the light. It's
true that we get confused sometimes, and that's why we need to walk a Path that gives us a
direction. It's true that every human being feels loneliness, and that's why the Dhamma is
also a Path of friendship. It's true that our own sankharas rise up, and we ourselves become
angry or faithless, and in doubt, and that's why we seek the Path of goodness of heart, or
self-puriMication.

Meditation is the tool that can place our hand underneath the light, the Path, the friend, and
the heart.

[END]

This talk was originally given to an audience of Old Students (i.e. those who have completed a
10-Day Vipassana course as taught by S.N. Goenka). Accordingly, it contains language and
concepts that are familiar to Old Students, and it may not make sense to someone who is not
familiar with this terminology.

More information about vipassana can be found at https://www.dhamma.org.

Audio of this talk can be found here: https://store.pariyatti.org/Meditating-in-Troubled-Times-

Dr-Paul-R-Fleischman-Vipassana

© Ⓟ 2017 Paul Fleischman

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