Vipassana Theory

Vipassana means to see things as they truly are. It is a non-sectarian, non-denominational meditation technique whose goal is to help you glimpse your reality.

To achieve these goals, the Vipassana technique relies on a very specific, rigidly adhered to format which has, supposedly, been passed down unchanged from the time of Gautama Buddha.

Noble Silence

Every Vipassi who is at a Vipassana camp is considered a Bhikkhu, an ordained Buddhist monk. Such a monk is expected to strictly adhere to five (first timers) or eight (others) precepts.

The first precept is to tell no lies. Maintaining complete silence helps achieve this precept. How can you tell a lie if you are not even talking?

The Noble Silence also keeps your practice untainted by others describing their own experiences.

The Buddha Connection

Legend has it that knowledge of the process of Vipassana has periodically risen and then died out in the Indian subcontinent over the past thousands of years.

Anyway who follows Vipasanna to its logical end automatically attains Nirvana and is called a Buddha.

The Gautama Buddha (the peaceful Buddha of statues) himself said that he is merely one more student of Vipassana and many Buddhas have gone before him and many more will follow. If you have heard the word Tathagatha used in context of the Gautama Buddha, it merely means the Buddha who just went. Back when the word Tathagatha was used to talk about the Gautama, he had been the most recent Buddha to have attained Nirvana and left the mortal world. Of course, since then, many others may have attained Bodhi (Nirvana) and technically, Tathagatha could refer to Rajesh from accounting who has achieved Nirvana. Still, the typical understanding of the word Tathagatha means the Gautama Buddha.

Nirvana for all

Vipassana posits that anyone can follow the exact same steps that the Buddha did and achieve the exact same results as him, i.e., Nirvana.

It literally provides a roadmap to Nirvana with well documented mile markers and descriptions of the sights you will see on the way to Nirvana.

Experiential

Vipassana is very experiential. You are not expected to believe or accept any thing you do not personally undergo. This makes Vipassana very distinct from a religion most (all?) of whom ask for devotion to an unexperienced ideal.

If you have never been as perfect as Muhammed or as compassionate as Jesus, you would just have to trust that their levels of perfection or compassion exist. Not having experienced it ourselves, it becomes easy to blame ourself for not being sufficiently perfect or compassionate.

That said, we ought to remind ourselves that Vipassana is not a religion so comparing it with Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other such -ism is meaningless.

Dharma

The Buddha's big insight was that only truly universal, guaranteed outcome experienced by one and all regardless of our sectarian beliefs was that every emotion we felt caused our minds to be disturbed.

There is no atheist, no Muslim, no Buddhist, no Hindu, no Sikh, no Jain, no animist on Earth who, on feeling anger or lust or joy or jealousy or any other emotion, can stay perfectly normal and equanimous.

This he termed as the Dharma of nature. It was inviolable and guaranteed. Over time, the word Dharma became synonymous with religion but it used to mean exactly one thing - if you feel an emotion, your mind will be roiled.

Vipassana promised(s) a way to maintain an equanimous, peaceful mind in the face of emotion.

Impermanence

How Vipassana promises peace of mind is clever in its simplicity.

The technique has you looking inwards noticing sensations that arise on your skin (at first) and then under the skin (eventually). Sensations can be anything from an itch to a tingle to a sense of the room's atmosphere. It is not some magical, never before experienced sensation unlocked just for Vipassis.

As you notice sensations on different parts of your skin, you are expected to keep from reacting to them. You merely observe the sensation and move on the looking for sensations elsewhere on your person.

After a few minutes, if you go back to the site of the original sensation, you may notice that the sensation has died down. It has proved to be impermanent. In this lies the core lesson of Vipassana. Things change.

Equanimity

As you absorb the lesson of impermanence, you start to see everything - including your strongest emotions - as subject to change. How seriously should you take your seething rage when you know that you will not be as angry in a day?

How permanent is your love for your significant other when you happily survived the decades prior to meeting them?

Your mind becomes better at recognizing and managing the mood swings that come with emotional turmoil. This change happens gradually but just as night follows day, equanimity replaces volatility.

Some woo-woo

Vipassana says that

• Those sensations you experience on the skin are your past emotional turmoils manifesting themselves
• At the moment of death, your soul carries over its last emotion, be it positive or negative, into the next life. Equanimity short-circuits this process allowing the soul to escape the cycle of death-birth-death
• Becoming a Vipassi is dependent on having done good deeds in this and past lives
• People get called to Vipassana and it not necessary to entice or otherwise encourage people to take up Vipassana.