This is an AI transcript of an interview by Lawrence Castilia with George A. Boyd, founder of the Mudrashram Institute for Spiritual Studies discussing both the mechanics of basic Vipassana techniques and how George combined Vipassana with Raja Yoga to create a new style of meditation.
Lawrence: Vipassana meditation, also known as mindfulness meditation, is probably the style of meditation that most people first encounter in the West. Vipassana translates as insight or clear seeing and is said to have been originated by the Buddha 2,500 years ago. Vipassana has been embraced by psychologists and other professions as a means for stress reduction, relaxation, and generating detachment or space from one's emotional and mental issues.
I'm going to use the words Vipassana and mindfulness interchangeably. I think the primary reason that mindfulness meditation has been embraced so widely here in the West is not due to its ease of use or its effectiveness, but rather because Western culture places such an emphasis on the mind and thinking. This made the adoption of Vipassana as a technique a better fit for Western culture than, let's say, praying to a goddess or chanting a mantra. In a similar way to how Zen Buddhism was admired because the public perception was that a monk thinks about a koan or thought puzzle, solves it, and achieves enlightenment, Vipassana meditation was embraced because it had a strong mental focus.
The West is very mind-focused. Other cultures may define themselves in relation to their family or maybe their vocation. In the West, we value intellect, independence of thought, innovation, which is seen as a result of mental activity. The French philosopher Descartes made famous the phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am’, meaning the ability to use the mind is what proves my existence. I actually think the modern sensibility can be better phrased as ‘you are what you think’. We see this especially in modern social media where the trend is to try to sum up a person completely based on their thoughts or their opinions. That being said, mindfulness meditation is often described as a way to transcend thought. A popular belief is that to experience what's called the power of now or to be here now, you must get past distracting thoughts to arrive at a space that is more real.
Vipassana meditation is often described as a technique that allows you to be in the moment or to realize the power of now. Similarly, Vipassana is also said to help calm the emotions, to reduce overreacting to events in our lives and to generate detachment from outcome and objectivity to events. Before going into the details of what Vipassana is, the actual technique or techniques, it's actually better to start with a clear understanding of why you should practice Vipassana. That leads me to my first question. George, why do you teach Vipassana?
George: Vipassana we subsume under what we call centering methods, and it is a way to use a present time focus to process through the issues that you're carrying within your body and to transcend them, to move into the state of being, which is at the core of the personality. A state of peacefulness, a state of centeredness, a state of oneness with the environment. Many people cultivate this state because it is essentially stress free. We teach it as part of several different methods that we use to gain union with the self at the centre of the personality and also the step beyond it, the state of being, which is also one step beyond the self at the nucleus of the personality.
Vipassana has many, many forms, many different ways that it is done. For example, you can do a body scan at the waking state of consciousness and notice what you're experiencing in that state. You can do a walking meditation, which activates your movement awareness centre. You can do a sensory Vipassana where you have heightened awareness of each of your senses. Physical Vipassana where you're meditating on what's arising within the physical body. Emotional Vipassana where you can monitor your emotions as they're arising and ultimately transcend them. Mental Vipassana where you're monitoring your thoughts and ultimately coming to a place where you transcend your thoughts. You can monitor the different I am statements of the ego and this brings you to the state of transcending the ego.
There is a variety of methods by which people can approach Vipassana. Many people also use simply watching the breath and being mindful of the breath in the present time. This is a way that people gain a sense of being centered, a sense of being present. These are some of the different ways that Vipassana can be used.
Lawrence: You talked about that you use it as a centering technique to unite the attention with the self, the centre of the personality. You started by saying that that it can overcome issues in the physical body. What are the issues that you're finding in the physical body that are overcome that need to be overcome in order to achieve centering?
George: When you are doing Vipassana, you are aware of what is arising in the present time. As you pay attention to this process, you start processing a variety of feelings that are arising in the physical body. Pain in the shoulder, tickle on the nose, whatever it is. You keep processing those and at a certain point you have a breakthrough experience and then you jump up into a higher level of awareness. It's a way of creating a breakthrough experience.
By doing that, you move into a state of peace, a state in which you're transcending the sensations that you're having within your body. If you do the same thing at the level of feelings, you're going to work with the issues of your feelings. And at the level of your mind, you're going to see the things that you're thinking about, eventually transcending that into a state of greater awareness and peace.
Lawrence: So, feelings and sensations are obstacles?
George: Well, they're not obstacles per se, but if your objective is you want to get out of the Conscious mind, then you have to somehow find a way to transcend what is occurring in the Conscious mind. Many meditators start to go into meditation, they see, oh, you know, all the things I'm thinking about and they can't get beyond that. Vipassana is one method which has been developed to help you transcend the thought processes that are going on and reach a higher state of consciousness. Everyone kind of experiences things that they can't necessarily get past.
Lawrence: Let’s say someone ripped you off, or you have an issue with your partner leaving you for reasons that you can't fathom. And the emotion just resonates and resonates and resonates and it doesn't seem like something you can get past. I suppose similarly, you could say there's even physical sensations. Obviously more likely if you've experienced some type of trauma, maybe you have, persistent neck issues, for example. So, you're sitting down and you're going to be very focused on that discomfort.
Or you go to a therapist, you have a specific goal in mind, get past your fear of driving or whatever the issue is. Then you dig into that issue, all of a sudden the trauma of being in the car accident when you were eight years old and a family member dying comes up.
Like we may use body work to get past physical issues, we may use therapy to help us overcome emotional issues. Is Vipassana another one of those tools or techniques that's actually helping to overcome an issue and put it behind us?
George: Vipassana has a strength of enabling you to process things, to pay full attention to them and allow them to arise and then pass away. If you're having an issue with trauma, you fully experience it, you remain fully connected with it, fully present with it. You allow it to be there, you fully experience it, you allow it to complete, you let it go, you release it. As a process of doing that, sometimes you gain insight into it, well, what is this about? But as you do this successively for each layer, whatever is going on with you, eventually you break through and you transcend.
Will it make the issue ultimately disappear? Well, not in all cases, but you will transcend it. Maybe you'll come back to it when you're not in the state of meditation, you notice it's come up again. You're going to look at it again. You need to look at it until finally you understand, what is the key that unlocks this lock. Once you do that, then you finish that issue.
Lawrence: Now in Buddhism, Vipassana is looked as a primary technique to allow one to achieve nirvana, which they call the cessation of phenomena. These thoughts, these feelings, these sensations in the body, are these the phenomena that they're talking about? Or are they talking about even deeper levels where phenomena arise from?
George: Let's think about the layers or levels of Vipassana. The first layer is you're processing something in your Conscious mind, this is the most typical type. This is what a therapist does. This is what a lot of mindfulness teachers do. They teach you how to process the issues in your Conscious mind to let them settle down. If you break through, the next stage you reach is the state of the voidness of being at the centre of the personality. As you continue the process of working with any issues that are arising, really behind the self, any deep issues, you lift up into what we call the wave of the present time.
A lot of the people who talk about the power of now are basically referring to this wave of the present time that dwells in the abstract mind plane. At this level, you are aware of the soul's thoughts and intentions coming into your human life, you're able to begin to work with the issues directly and dissolve them. If you finish this process, typically you'll lift up into the consciousness of what we call the soul, the higher self. And you'll become aware that at that level, you have a present time experience. If you finish that level, then you jump up into the seed atom on the Supercosmic path where they practice vipassana. Their primary method of transformation is then focusing at that point and working through each of the issues that are behind that seed atom. That eventually leads that seed atom all the way across the track to the great void of nirvana. So, those are the layers of vipassana.
It is possible to monitor the present time at many different levels of the psyche. In the late 1980s, we developed a meditation system called Raja Vipassana, where you focus your mind at a particular level. You pay attention to what is arising in the present time. Use the focusing method to select a place where you're going to monitor the present time. Then you monitor the present time using the classical vipassana method.
Lawrence: You mentioned the first step as moving into the voidness of being. Did you say that was behind the self?
George: Yes, it's you might say that being is the passive aspect of the personality. The self is the active, executive driver of everything that you do. But on the other side of that is the peaceful part of you. The part of you that allows you to just be one with the environment. A sense of just being in a state of peace. That is the counterpart of the active self. You have both aspects in your nature. You just can't be doing and acting all the time. You've got to have some time for rest, relaxation, getting in touch with peace. So, a variety of meditation approaches have targeted this pool of peace, as it were, inside of people as a place of gaining some release from the stress that they're experiencing. We teach this as part of our centering methods.
Lawrence: The way you're looking at the self seems very holistic and very integrated. A lot of times people, when they don't necessarily understand something, they look at one as bad and one as good. One is white, one is black. They're opposite sides of the coin. Because a lot of the people who talk about the power of now, be here now, they talk about that is the good. They don't talk about the good of having an active self that can be productive, that can, do things. That's a really important part of our lives. We have both active and passive states. They're harmonious. You can't have one without the other, but you shouldn't call one bad and one good necessarily.
It's better to understand that they both have a place because you're not abandoning the self when you move into that voidness of being that's behind the active self. It's just another aspect of the self.
George: Yes, it is an aspect of the self, but it's closer to the idea in Buddhism of no self. They don't focus on the self, they focus on being. There's no sense of self there, you're just one with everything around you. It seems like actions arise of themselves.
They speak about something in Taoism that they call wu wei, which means that action occurs of itself. There's no doer, it just happens. In the state of being, it seems like things just happen. It's a state in which you experience peace. You're not stressed out about anything. You let go of everything and you're just in a state of peace. This is very regenerative. When we're actively encountering stress, we're often using our sympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system, which is creating the stress hormones and everything like that.
When we move into a state of being and a state of peace, we turn that off and we begin operating on what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. That's regenerating. It helps the body re-establish its homeostasis, its state of calmness and peace and regular harmony. It's important that we have a time in which we're not simply going all the time, but we have to have a time of letting go of that and release. That's where the entering the state of being comes in.
Lawrence: What would be the most common way that someone would use Vipassana to get to that state of no self? Is that the ultimate goal of some practitioners of Vipassana? Guide me through how they get to that point. And for some people, is that the end of the journey?
George: There are a variety of methods by which you can get to the state of being. You can put your attention in it. You can breathe into it. You can work through the issues in your physical body and get to it. You can look at the space between two thoughts. There's a variety of methods for going into the state of being.
Some people simply want to have a little bit of peace and they're not looking for transcendence. They're not looking to transcend the personality. They simply want to be in their lives and they just want to experience greater peace and harmony, not experiencing so much stress and so many difficulties in their lives. I'm often reminded of the movie The Lion King and they have this song in there called Hakuna Matata. In the song everything is okay, everything is good. Just go with the flow. This is when you enter the state of being, you're in the flow.
There's a variety of methods by which people achieve this, but it's simply a matter of knowing where it is on the scale of the different what we call the vehicles of consciousness, the different focal points within the Conscious, Subconscious or Metaconscious mind. In our Introduction to Meditation program, we specifically teach methods to get you in touch with this voidness of being inside yourself. Once you experience this, once you experience this peace that's always inside of you, you can go here and just be in that state of peace and let go of some of the stress you're carrying.
Lawrence: A lot of people talk about a moment when they surrender as a pivotal moment in their lives where something happens and they surrender. I'm going to bring this down to something kind of mundane, but I used to get a lot of polarity bodywork from my friend James in Los Angeles. Of course, in different bodywork styles, they hold points.
One of James's little techniques was he had a way of working the Achilles tendon that would basically drive you crazy. I'd be lying on the table and he knows that the way he's working that tendon, it's like at some point you're going to have to give in. To just relax. Pain, yes, but it's even more than that. It's almost like nails on chalkboard, you might want to say. And at some point, the body relaxes, you surrender, all of a sudden, you're like, OK, I don't want to think about anything. I'm just going to stop. Everything's going to stop. I'm just going to surrender. You kind of go into this peaceful place.
When that type of surrendering is happening. Are people moving into this state of being? Are they moving into non-self?
George: Perhaps in some cases, that's true. We often say that there is a window between the thoughts in which you can be present as your attention. Witnessing doesn't necessarily mean that your attention is united with this pool of peace, this state of being. We need to make a distinction between being aware of the activity of the mind versus slipping into the state where you are present as the attention and you're simply witnessing the activity of the mind. That is a distinction, each person who learns to meditate needs to make so that you are aware that you are the attention, observing the content of the mind as opposed to simply being the content of the mind going on.
Once you slip out of that active state of turmoil, you move into the state of reflective, observing presence, then you gain a certain amount of greater clarity, greater insight, a certain detachment from the content that's going on. If you reach this state of inner presence and witnessing, then you can detach from what you're experiencing going on around you. I think that a lot of the Vipassana teachers try to cultivate this state so that you're not immediately reacting to everything, that you can kind of just witness it and watch it. Instead of being the actor in the movie, you're the person watching the movie.
Lawrence: You talked about different kind of plateaus of experience that Vipassana can lead you to. I'd like you to go through that ladder again, but with some context. In my research on Vipassana, I found that there were a number of additional techniques that were added over the centuries which became part of the practice of Vipassana. These new techniques mainly changed the object of focus for meditation, including meditating on all phases of decomposition of a corpse, meditating on infinite nothingness, meditating on great compassion, meditating on what is infinite consciousness. There's a whole bunch of these.
Some of these objects of focus seems like they're chosen to bring up a reaction from the unconscious mind, such as fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of non-existence. You're then meant to process through that emotion. Is that what is happening by meditating on death and nothingness? Or is there something else going on? Why do you think these additional practices were added to the canon of Vipassana over time? Was it to get to higher levels of consciousness on the ladder that you were describing?
George: If you think about what we call the Supercosmic seed atom that dwells upon this track that leads to the state of nirvana, which is known in Vipassana. A seed atom is a state of identification that one has on a Supercosmic path. In our writings, we describe centres that are called nuclei of identity. These are essences in the Superconscious mind with which people come to identify.
In many Supercosmic paths, they have a variety of procedures or initiations by which they bring people up to union with that seed atom upon their path. As you begin the process of contemplating, you move into what is arising at the different levels. One level along that track is meditating on death. Another level might be meditating on the great void, which corresponds to what the Hindus call Nirvikalpa Samadhi, or what we call Shantidesh, the place of great peace.
As you move along this track, you come into these particular perspectives where you are processing and meditating on great archetypes of divine ideas that are present along this track and are in many cases are somewhat unique to this track that you don't, when you go on another super cosmic path. You're not going to get these same ideas, you're not going to get these same archetypes. But these are all parts of that fifth order of Vipassana, which is when you're actually doing Vipassana, the level of the seed atom upon the path. But you have to break through into that. You have to move through one level, detach from it, and then move through that level, detach from it. Ultimately you get up to the state where you can do these more advanced meditations that are described in these texts.
Lawrence: What are the five orders of Vipassana?
George: The first order of Vipassana is simply processing of the level of the Conscious mind. When you finish that, typically what happens is you reach the state of being. The next level is you begin processing at that level, watching what's coming into the voidness of consciousness. Eventually you jump up into the wave of consciousness.
The wave of consciousness in the present time is where you become aware of the thoughts and intentions of the soul coming into your human life. It's a place where the soul interfaces with your human life in the present time. You work through that, then you discover the soul, which is the one who is originating those thoughts. As you process at that level, you transcend the soul, then you move up into union with this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist path.
This is where the Buddhists come up with the idea that there is no self, because you move into the voidness of being, and there is no soul, because you transcend the soul, you realize that that's part of the phenomena of the mind, the samsara, the phenomena of creation, but it has no essential reality.
Lawrence: What level is that at?
George: When you're in union with this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist Supercosmic path.
Lawrence: So, they're transcending the soul, and then they decide that there is no soul because they've moved above it.
George: Yeah, that's right. It's just part of its phenomena. There's no inherent reality to it.
Lawrence: That's a very confusing thing to describe to people. But I guess this is the experience that is a result of practicing vipassana at the deepest levels.
George: The issue is that you're disidentifying with each level that you let go of. You disidentify with the phenomena of the Conscious mind, and you discover being. You disidentify with being, you discover that there is a creative process taking place in the higher mind that is essentially creating the phenomena of human life. When you discover where that energy is coming from, you discover that's being projected from some higher level, you even transcend that, then you discover this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist path.
In many traditions, they bypass Conscious mind, Metaconscious mind, Superconscious mind, soul, all together, and they simply focus you on the seed atom of their path. Then they say, now you've begun the way. They just tend to skip over the material at those other levels. They don't consider them important. You see the same thing happening in transcendental paths. For example, you have to bring your attention all the way up to the beginning of a transcendental path to begin their path, you unite with the spirit, you identify with that, then you regard everything else as being part of the world of mind that is veiling the presence of the spirit.
It's kind of a similar idea that you get above the illusion or the samsara, and you identify with the true essence, which in the Vipassana path is their Supercosmic seed atom.
Lawrence: And when they complete the Vipassana Supercosmic path, they can choose to liberate that path. That is, achieve liberation from that point of view.
George: Liberation from the standpoint of that seed atom is basically clearing all of the material that's on that track until ultimately you reach your origin or your source, then you experience the great limitless void that is the presence of what they call nirvana.
Lawrence: Without necessarily seeing that there's actually yet further vistas beyond that up at the transcendental levels of the Superconscious mind?
George: Yes, when you go to a chemistry teacher, the chemistry teacher is going to teach you chemistry. They're not going to teach you English or aeronautical engineering. They're going to teach you chemistry. In the same way, a teacher who has gained enlightenment on the Vipassana path. He's not going to teach you about the transcendental or planetary or about the trans-planetary, nor about the subtle. He's going to teach you about that path.
Their job is to get you completed, just like a professor's job is to get you through the class, give you all the instruction, test you to make sure you know your stuff, ultimately to pass the class and graduate. It's a similar idea, but it's done on a higher order.
Lawrence: If we broke basic Vipassana down, step one is to focus the attention in the present time. Step two is to observe and maybe label the contents of awareness. Step three, gain detachment or to disidentify from the contents of awareness. Maybe step four, viewing the contents of awareness as basically an ongoing process that is something other than the state of being that you now inhabit. Are those the four basic steps of Vipassana?
George: Well, you first pick an object of meditation. Where are you going to meditate? I'm going to watch myself walking or I'm going to focus on my breath in the present time. Or I'm going to focus on the sensations in my body. Then you're simply noticing them as they arise. To gain a little bit more detachment, discernment, you can label them, pain in my shoulder, stiffness in my neck.
You're basically noticing what it is as it comes up past us and then a new thing comes up. This is where the idea of impermanence comes from and the idea that everything is always changing. Like you're standing in a river and everything is moving all the time. Then at a certain point, as you process this material, you're actually moving through it. You're moving to a deeper layer, a deeper level. Eventually you have a state of transcendence of that and you move to a deeper state of mind.
This is the way that we view the Vipassana process. There certainly is a detachment that takes place. You're no longer identified with the thinking process, but you're watching the thinking process. You're no longer identified with the sensation process. You're watching the sensations.
Lawrence: Vipassana translates as insight or clear seeing. That kind of suggests that at some point you're going to be able to arrive at a state of consciousness that provides insight or clarity.
Let's say someone who's experiencing extreme depression hears about Vipassana. They start doing Vipassana. What's going to come up for them? ‘I'm so depressed. I can't pay my bills. I don't know what I'm supposed to do’. Whatever the source of the depression is. ‘I lost this. I don't have that’. Depression, depression, depression. Then they begin to identify or label the depression. At some point, hopefully they're going to break through and get to that state of being that we've talked about or no self.
Are they actually going to have clear seeing or insight at that point? Is there actually going to be something that comes from a deeper part of themselves, a more resourceful part of themselves that's going to be able to positively impact their situation? Or not just positively impact, but maybe dramatically change their situation? With insight or clear seeing?
George: The insight process comes by you being able to observe the layers of your depression. You clearly see that, yes, these particular thoughts and beliefs are giving rise to these particular reactions that I'm having. I'm remembering this. I'm crying. I notice that those are related. So that's that insight process. You go through all the layers that make up that depression until finally you reach the other side of it, you're able to transcend it.
In terms of being able to do something about it. Typically, as you begin to engage the self, you may be able to make some choices that are going to relieve aspects of that. If it's a matter of feeling depressed because you're not working, well, maybe you'll find a source of income. You'll work for somebody or you'll provide a service to somebody or you sell something to somebody that will get you some income coming in. This is the executive functions of your Metaconscious mind beginning to kick in and take charge of that. This is the issue - let's solve that problem.
In a deeper sense, when you get up to the wave of the present time, you're clearing a lot of issues up at that level. You're saying, instead of doing this, let's create this instead. You see this a lot in the New Age movement where people talk about creating their destiny, creating their timeline. This is a higher order of the executive functions of the Metaconscious mind. At that level, you're able to look at the entire issue and begin to disassemble it and replace it with something else.
Lawrence: In your writings, you talk about the seven gifts of Raja Vipassana. And you say that Vipassana is an effective form of meditation that brings several benefits to the practitioner that uses it. Specifically, it gives the ability to:
1.) objectively observe the contents of consciousness.
2.) process and release physical pain.
3.) open and release muscular armouring.
That's an interesting one for me. There was a gentleman, Wilhelm Reich, who developed a style of bodywork that targeted this muscular armouring. He would train practitioners to just kind of physically hold points. A lot of times pressing down on the chest for way too long by most people's standards until something would happen. So again, this idea that stuff is held in the body, and here you're calling it muscular armouring. Why do we have that?
George: It's a protective mechanism. We tend to wall off really deep issues because we want to function. If you're processing your issues all the time, you're not very functional. The deeper aspect of the mind, the unconscious mind says, we're going to allow this person to function. But we're going to have to keep this material out of awareness so that, you know, he or she is not overwhelmed by this material.
Lawrence: The body basically becomes a storehouse for stuff we can't deal with.
George: Yes, this is when we talk about the aspect of what we call stored karma. We say that there's an area of your experience where you are conscious. It's filled with light. You are functional. It is integrated. It is connected with a sense of self and a sense of you setting goals in your life and moving forward and expressing your abilities.
This is all non-conflicted versus an area of your mind that is filled with darkness and filled with conflict. It's chaotic, is full of a lot of passions and unfulfilled desires and painful memories. If we're working with those deeper issues like we do in psychotherapy, you're not able to simply function. You're dealing with something else.
In cases of individuals where this unconscious mind begins to just take over, they experience very severe forms of depression or cognitive disorganization, as we see in the schizophrenia or the manic episodes. You lose the faculty of judgment. But we look to this being the reservoir of stored karma. As you're able to work that out, to process it and then actually to transform it through more advanced meditation techniques, you can actually begin to turn that darkness into light. So instead of it being outside of your functional area, it becomes part of your functional area of the mind.
Lawrence: That's a pretty profound potential outcome by using these techniques. Let me finish going through the seven gifts of Raja Vipassana. That was number three, open and release muscular armouring:
4.) experience and release repressed emotions,
5.) gain insight into liminal and unconscious mental processes.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what are liminal and unconscious mental processes?
George: If we think about this area of light and consciousness within us, this functional space, if you will, within a person, where everything is integrated, everything is working together in a coordinated way, which allows you to work and to do all the things that you do in your life. When you move across the threshold into the unconscious, which we call the liminal zone of the mind, the unconscious mind is all of this area of darkness inside of you.
This is a zone of the mind that we normally don't have much contact with. Or if we do have contact with it we try and push it away. We really don't want to deal with that. We don't want to feel those shameful feelings, the feelings of inadequacy, deep frustration and pain in life because we need to be functional. We need to do our jobs. We need to take care of our families. We need to be there for the people in our lives. Unless people invest in therapy when they've got stuff coming up that's bothering them, or they invest in some type of insightive method to begin to look at this material, they basically are keeping this out of consciousness to the best of their ability.
Sigmund Freud said certain elements in the unconscious mind come through. They slip out. And for some people, it's not just a little a little leak here and there. For some people it's like being inundated by a waterfall and they are completely immersed in that. It's very hard for them to use the functional part of their mind.
Lawrence: The last two steps or gifts are:
6.) become aware of cravings, negative passions, such as anger, lust, greed, attachment, jealousy and egotism in the unconscious mind and let go of them.
7.) transcend the unconscious mind into higher states of awareness.
Then you state that transcendence appears to be the end product of this type of meditation. This process, these seven gifts you have listed are not just at one level of the mind, but you've actually developed a very extensive system for exploring and processing multiple aspects of the Superconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind and the Subconscious mind. There's Vipassana techniques that you have for many levels.
George: You're talking about what we call Raja Vipassana. This divided up the journey of self-discovery into three parts. The first would be the processing of the level of the Conscious mind. Then the level of the Subconscious and Metaconscious mind, which are part of this first part of the journey. Then the processing of the level of the soul up to the planetary level of the Superconscious mind and then moving to even higher levels of the Superconscious mind in the trans-planetary, cosmic and supercosmic. Ultimately doing Vipassana on the highest state of consciousness.
In each case, the process is similar in that you have a place where you're focusing the attention, then you begin to process - you begin to become aware of what is arising in the present time of that level. What are you experiencing at that level? Ultimately, what are the karmic impressions that are holding that state of consciousness in place? If you do a full meditation on that and you go through all the different layers, you are eventually going to transcend into even higher states of consciousness. When you're moving through this process of simply notice what's arising in the present time, you can go to deeper and deeper layers of this process. This can be done at multiple levels of the mind.
Lawrence: You developed the Raja-Vipassana course as you've developed other courses because someone asked for it. I know I've asked for things, like your Introduction to Meditation course was one I evoked out of you. In this case, when you developed the Raja vipassana course, it was at the request of a mutual friend of ours in 1987. As usual, you over-delivered in ridiculous fashion. Our friend Skip heard about Vipassana, thought it sounded cool. God knows what his impression of it was at that time. Maybe he was just following the breath. But he asked you to teach a Vipassana course. Instead of introducing a basic course ….follow your breath ….monitor the feelings….monitor the thoughts… You delivered the gargantuan, definitive, over-the-top, advanced Vipassana, Raja-Vipassana course. So, we practiced that course for over a year, Monday nights. We used to do one technique for three weeks, then we would move on to the next technique. And each time we would practice the preceding techniques briefly as we moved up the ladder of this Raja Yoga-styled course.
Your main focus has been Raja Yoga. What inspired you to create this course and how did you choose each section? Because a lot of these sections of mind, the Thousand Petal Lotus Centre, the Black Karmic Lotus Centre, the Three Mountain Centre, the Rainbow Bridge Centre, these are different centres, specific centres that you help people identify through meditation to process in this course. What brought this all together?
George: Well, what happens for me is that I ask a question, ‘what about this?’ Then my higher mind proceeds to give me guidance on this. I recall that I connected with one of the spiritual teachers of the Mudrashram lineage, one of our spiritual guides, he proceeded to say, ‘take dictation’, and I wrote down what he showed me. Then I meditated on each of those things so I could verify that those indeed were valid centres and that I wasn't creating this out of some creative part of my mind. Then I shared it. So that's the way my process works. I ask a question, I get guidance regarding it, I write it down, I edit it, and then I share it.
Lawrence: Why Vipassana? Why not just straight Raja Yoga? Why introduce Vipassana into that Raja Yoga approach?
George: Let me talk about the dimensional levels of the mind, the dimensional focus of what we call the attention. The first levels we can say, I can focus on a point, this is a focal point, I can move my attention from the waking state of consciousness to the movement awareness centre, and I can lock into that focal point. The next thing that happens is you start to become aware of that centre, you start to be able to contemplate, you start to be able to become aware of the content that's at that level.
The third state is when you begin to get a sense that this is a form or a body. This is where we find the idea that this is a shape or it's a form or it's a vehicle of consciousness where this is operating. The fourth stage is you start to monitor what's arising in the present time. Now straight Raja Yoga meditation is going to focus on the focal point, maybe contemplate, so the first two aspects of it. Whereas when you go deeper into the actual experience at that level, you're moving to that fourth stage where Vipassana takes place.
It is adding to the basic awareness that you get by doing Raja Yoga, by dropping deeper into the Vipassana state where you're having the experience in the present time, you're moving from one dimension to two dimensions when you become aware of the content arising. Three dimensions, you’re aware of form. Fourth dimension, you're aware of time. Fifth dimension you're aware of a transcendent centre that integrates that particular level of experience.
It's valuable that people learn about mindfulness, which is when you collect your attention and you are present. And to learn about Vipassana, which is the ability to begin to process things in the present time and to let them go and release them. This is a small subset of what we teach in integral meditation. If you had a handyman come to your house and you said, I need you to fix the window, it's jammed. I need you to replace that light bulb up there. My son made a hole in the wall. I need you to patch that. The handyman smiled and said, yes, I have a hammer. You would feel very uncomfortable that he didn't have the proper tool to do the job.
Vipassana is a wonderful tool, but it is only one tool of many that you need to work on the different issues that arise to do the work of transcendence and transformation. That's what we teach in integral meditation, starting with our Introduction to Meditation program.
Lawrence: Vipassana meditation, also known as mindfulness meditation, is probably the style of meditation that most people first encounter in the West. Vipassana translates as insight or clear seeing and is said to have been originated by the Buddha 2,500 years ago. Vipassana has been embraced by psychologists and other professions as a means for stress reduction, relaxation, and generating detachment or space from one's emotional and mental issues.
I'm going to use the words Vipassana and mindfulness interchangeably. I think the primary reason that mindfulness meditation has been embraced so widely here in the West is not due to its ease of use or its effectiveness, but rather because Western culture places such an emphasis on the mind and thinking. This made the adoption of Vipassana as a technique a better fit for Western culture than, let's say, praying to a goddess or chanting a mantra. In a similar way to how Zen Buddhism was admired because the public perception was that a monk thinks about a koan or thought puzzle, solves it, and achieves enlightenment, Vipassana meditation was embraced because it had a strong mental focus.
The West is very mind-focused. Other cultures may define themselves in relation to their family or maybe their vocation. In the West, we value intellect, independence of thought, innovation, which is seen as a result of mental activity. The French philosopher Descartes made famous the phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am’, meaning the ability to use the mind is what proves my existence. I actually think the modern sensibility can be better phrased as ‘you are what you think’. We see this especially in modern social media where the trend is to try to sum up a person completely based on their thoughts or their opinions. That being said, mindfulness meditation is often described as a way to transcend thought. A popular belief is that to experience what's called the power of now or to be here now, you must get past distracting thoughts to arrive at a space that is more real.
Vipassana meditation is often described as a technique that allows you to be in the moment or to realize the power of now. Similarly, Vipassana is also said to help calm the emotions, to reduce overreacting to events in our lives and to generate detachment from outcome and objectivity to events. Before going into the details of what Vipassana is, the actual technique or techniques, it's actually better to start with a clear understanding of why you should practice Vipassana. That leads me to my first question. George, why do you teach Vipassana?
George: Vipassana we subsume under what we call centering methods, and it is a way to use a present time focus to process through the issues that you're carrying within your body and to transcend them, to move into the state of being, which is at the core of the personality. A state of peacefulness, a state of centeredness, a state of oneness with the environment. Many people cultivate this state because it is essentially stress free. We teach it as part of several different methods that we use to gain union with the self at the centre of the personality and also the step beyond it, the state of being, which is also one step beyond the self at the nucleus of the personality.
Vipassana has many, many forms, many different ways that it is done. For example, you can do a body scan at the waking state of consciousness and notice what you're experiencing in that state. You can do a walking meditation, which activates your movement awareness centre. You can do a sensory Vipassana where you have heightened awareness of each of your senses. Physical Vipassana where you're meditating on what's arising within the physical body. Emotional Vipassana where you can monitor your emotions as they're arising and ultimately transcend them. Mental Vipassana where you're monitoring your thoughts and ultimately coming to a place where you transcend your thoughts. You can monitor the different I am statements of the ego and this brings you to the state of transcending the ego.
There is a variety of methods by which people can approach Vipassana. Many people also use simply watching the breath and being mindful of the breath in the present time. This is a way that people gain a sense of being centered, a sense of being present. These are some of the different ways that Vipassana can be used.
Lawrence: You talked about that you use it as a centering technique to unite the attention with the self, the centre of the personality. You started by saying that that it can overcome issues in the physical body. What are the issues that you're finding in the physical body that are overcome that need to be overcome in order to achieve centering?
George: When you are doing Vipassana, you are aware of what is arising in the present time. As you pay attention to this process, you start processing a variety of feelings that are arising in the physical body. Pain in the shoulder, tickle on the nose, whatever it is. You keep processing those and at a certain point you have a breakthrough experience and then you jump up into a higher level of awareness. It's a way of creating a breakthrough experience.
By doing that, you move into a state of peace, a state in which you're transcending the sensations that you're having within your body. If you do the same thing at the level of feelings, you're going to work with the issues of your feelings. And at the level of your mind, you're going to see the things that you're thinking about, eventually transcending that into a state of greater awareness and peace.
Lawrence: So, feelings and sensations are obstacles?
George: Well, they're not obstacles per se, but if your objective is you want to get out of the Conscious mind, then you have to somehow find a way to transcend what is occurring in the Conscious mind. Many meditators start to go into meditation, they see, oh, you know, all the things I'm thinking about and they can't get beyond that. Vipassana is one method which has been developed to help you transcend the thought processes that are going on and reach a higher state of consciousness. Everyone kind of experiences things that they can't necessarily get past.
Lawrence: Let’s say someone ripped you off, or you have an issue with your partner leaving you for reasons that you can't fathom. And the emotion just resonates and resonates and resonates and it doesn't seem like something you can get past. I suppose similarly, you could say there's even physical sensations. Obviously more likely if you've experienced some type of trauma, maybe you have, persistent neck issues, for example. So, you're sitting down and you're going to be very focused on that discomfort.
Or you go to a therapist, you have a specific goal in mind, get past your fear of driving or whatever the issue is. Then you dig into that issue, all of a sudden the trauma of being in the car accident when you were eight years old and a family member dying comes up.
Like we may use body work to get past physical issues, we may use therapy to help us overcome emotional issues. Is Vipassana another one of those tools or techniques that's actually helping to overcome an issue and put it behind us?
George: Vipassana has a strength of enabling you to process things, to pay full attention to them and allow them to arise and then pass away. If you're having an issue with trauma, you fully experience it, you remain fully connected with it, fully present with it. You allow it to be there, you fully experience it, you allow it to complete, you let it go, you release it. As a process of doing that, sometimes you gain insight into it, well, what is this about? But as you do this successively for each layer, whatever is going on with you, eventually you break through and you transcend.
Will it make the issue ultimately disappear? Well, not in all cases, but you will transcend it. Maybe you'll come back to it when you're not in the state of meditation, you notice it's come up again. You're going to look at it again. You need to look at it until finally you understand, what is the key that unlocks this lock. Once you do that, then you finish that issue.
Lawrence: Now in Buddhism, Vipassana is looked as a primary technique to allow one to achieve nirvana, which they call the cessation of phenomena. These thoughts, these feelings, these sensations in the body, are these the phenomena that they're talking about? Or are they talking about even deeper levels where phenomena arise from?
George: Let's think about the layers or levels of Vipassana. The first layer is you're processing something in your Conscious mind, this is the most typical type. This is what a therapist does. This is what a lot of mindfulness teachers do. They teach you how to process the issues in your Conscious mind to let them settle down. If you break through, the next stage you reach is the state of the voidness of being at the centre of the personality. As you continue the process of working with any issues that are arising, really behind the self, any deep issues, you lift up into what we call the wave of the present time.
A lot of the people who talk about the power of now are basically referring to this wave of the present time that dwells in the abstract mind plane. At this level, you are aware of the soul's thoughts and intentions coming into your human life, you're able to begin to work with the issues directly and dissolve them. If you finish this process, typically you'll lift up into the consciousness of what we call the soul, the higher self. And you'll become aware that at that level, you have a present time experience. If you finish that level, then you jump up into the seed atom on the Supercosmic path where they practice vipassana. Their primary method of transformation is then focusing at that point and working through each of the issues that are behind that seed atom. That eventually leads that seed atom all the way across the track to the great void of nirvana. So, those are the layers of vipassana.
It is possible to monitor the present time at many different levels of the psyche. In the late 1980s, we developed a meditation system called Raja Vipassana, where you focus your mind at a particular level. You pay attention to what is arising in the present time. Use the focusing method to select a place where you're going to monitor the present time. Then you monitor the present time using the classical vipassana method.
Lawrence: You mentioned the first step as moving into the voidness of being. Did you say that was behind the self?
George: Yes, it's you might say that being is the passive aspect of the personality. The self is the active, executive driver of everything that you do. But on the other side of that is the peaceful part of you. The part of you that allows you to just be one with the environment. A sense of just being in a state of peace. That is the counterpart of the active self. You have both aspects in your nature. You just can't be doing and acting all the time. You've got to have some time for rest, relaxation, getting in touch with peace. So, a variety of meditation approaches have targeted this pool of peace, as it were, inside of people as a place of gaining some release from the stress that they're experiencing. We teach this as part of our centering methods.
Lawrence: The way you're looking at the self seems very holistic and very integrated. A lot of times people, when they don't necessarily understand something, they look at one as bad and one as good. One is white, one is black. They're opposite sides of the coin. Because a lot of the people who talk about the power of now, be here now, they talk about that is the good. They don't talk about the good of having an active self that can be productive, that can, do things. That's a really important part of our lives. We have both active and passive states. They're harmonious. You can't have one without the other, but you shouldn't call one bad and one good necessarily.
It's better to understand that they both have a place because you're not abandoning the self when you move into that voidness of being that's behind the active self. It's just another aspect of the self.
George: Yes, it is an aspect of the self, but it's closer to the idea in Buddhism of no self. They don't focus on the self, they focus on being. There's no sense of self there, you're just one with everything around you. It seems like actions arise of themselves.
They speak about something in Taoism that they call wu wei, which means that action occurs of itself. There's no doer, it just happens. In the state of being, it seems like things just happen. It's a state in which you experience peace. You're not stressed out about anything. You let go of everything and you're just in a state of peace. This is very regenerative. When we're actively encountering stress, we're often using our sympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system, which is creating the stress hormones and everything like that.
When we move into a state of being and a state of peace, we turn that off and we begin operating on what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. That's regenerating. It helps the body re-establish its homeostasis, its state of calmness and peace and regular harmony. It's important that we have a time in which we're not simply going all the time, but we have to have a time of letting go of that and release. That's where the entering the state of being comes in.
Lawrence: What would be the most common way that someone would use Vipassana to get to that state of no self? Is that the ultimate goal of some practitioners of Vipassana? Guide me through how they get to that point. And for some people, is that the end of the journey?
George: There are a variety of methods by which you can get to the state of being. You can put your attention in it. You can breathe into it. You can work through the issues in your physical body and get to it. You can look at the space between two thoughts. There's a variety of methods for going into the state of being.
Some people simply want to have a little bit of peace and they're not looking for transcendence. They're not looking to transcend the personality. They simply want to be in their lives and they just want to experience greater peace and harmony, not experiencing so much stress and so many difficulties in their lives. I'm often reminded of the movie The Lion King and they have this song in there called Hakuna Matata. In the song everything is okay, everything is good. Just go with the flow. This is when you enter the state of being, you're in the flow.
There's a variety of methods by which people achieve this, but it's simply a matter of knowing where it is on the scale of the different what we call the vehicles of consciousness, the different focal points within the Conscious, Subconscious or Metaconscious mind. In our Introduction to Meditation program, we specifically teach methods to get you in touch with this voidness of being inside yourself. Once you experience this, once you experience this peace that's always inside of you, you can go here and just be in that state of peace and let go of some of the stress you're carrying.
Lawrence: A lot of people talk about a moment when they surrender as a pivotal moment in their lives where something happens and they surrender. I'm going to bring this down to something kind of mundane, but I used to get a lot of polarity bodywork from my friend James in Los Angeles. Of course, in different bodywork styles, they hold points.
One of James's little techniques was he had a way of working the Achilles tendon that would basically drive you crazy. I'd be lying on the table and he knows that the way he's working that tendon, it's like at some point you're going to have to give in. To just relax. Pain, yes, but it's even more than that. It's almost like nails on chalkboard, you might want to say. And at some point, the body relaxes, you surrender, all of a sudden, you're like, OK, I don't want to think about anything. I'm just going to stop. Everything's going to stop. I'm just going to surrender. You kind of go into this peaceful place.
When that type of surrendering is happening. Are people moving into this state of being? Are they moving into non-self?
George: Perhaps in some cases, that's true. We often say that there is a window between the thoughts in which you can be present as your attention. Witnessing doesn't necessarily mean that your attention is united with this pool of peace, this state of being. We need to make a distinction between being aware of the activity of the mind versus slipping into the state where you are present as the attention and you're simply witnessing the activity of the mind. That is a distinction, each person who learns to meditate needs to make so that you are aware that you are the attention, observing the content of the mind as opposed to simply being the content of the mind going on.
Once you slip out of that active state of turmoil, you move into the state of reflective, observing presence, then you gain a certain amount of greater clarity, greater insight, a certain detachment from the content that's going on. If you reach this state of inner presence and witnessing, then you can detach from what you're experiencing going on around you. I think that a lot of the Vipassana teachers try to cultivate this state so that you're not immediately reacting to everything, that you can kind of just witness it and watch it. Instead of being the actor in the movie, you're the person watching the movie.
Lawrence: You talked about different kind of plateaus of experience that Vipassana can lead you to. I'd like you to go through that ladder again, but with some context. In my research on Vipassana, I found that there were a number of additional techniques that were added over the centuries which became part of the practice of Vipassana. These new techniques mainly changed the object of focus for meditation, including meditating on all phases of decomposition of a corpse, meditating on infinite nothingness, meditating on great compassion, meditating on what is infinite consciousness. There's a whole bunch of these.
Some of these objects of focus seems like they're chosen to bring up a reaction from the unconscious mind, such as fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of non-existence. You're then meant to process through that emotion. Is that what is happening by meditating on death and nothingness? Or is there something else going on? Why do you think these additional practices were added to the canon of Vipassana over time? Was it to get to higher levels of consciousness on the ladder that you were describing?
George: If you think about what we call the Supercosmic seed atom that dwells upon this track that leads to the state of nirvana, which is known in Vipassana. A seed atom is a state of identification that one has on a Supercosmic path. In our writings, we describe centres that are called nuclei of identity. These are essences in the Superconscious mind with which people come to identify.
In many Supercosmic paths, they have a variety of procedures or initiations by which they bring people up to union with that seed atom upon their path. As you begin the process of contemplating, you move into what is arising at the different levels. One level along that track is meditating on death. Another level might be meditating on the great void, which corresponds to what the Hindus call Nirvikalpa Samadhi, or what we call Shantidesh, the place of great peace.
As you move along this track, you come into these particular perspectives where you are processing and meditating on great archetypes of divine ideas that are present along this track and are in many cases are somewhat unique to this track that you don't, when you go on another super cosmic path. You're not going to get these same ideas, you're not going to get these same archetypes. But these are all parts of that fifth order of Vipassana, which is when you're actually doing Vipassana, the level of the seed atom upon the path. But you have to break through into that. You have to move through one level, detach from it, and then move through that level, detach from it. Ultimately you get up to the state where you can do these more advanced meditations that are described in these texts.
Lawrence: What are the five orders of Vipassana?
George: The first order of Vipassana is simply processing of the level of the Conscious mind. When you finish that, typically what happens is you reach the state of being. The next level is you begin processing at that level, watching what's coming into the voidness of consciousness. Eventually you jump up into the wave of consciousness.
The wave of consciousness in the present time is where you become aware of the thoughts and intentions of the soul coming into your human life. It's a place where the soul interfaces with your human life in the present time. You work through that, then you discover the soul, which is the one who is originating those thoughts. As you process at that level, you transcend the soul, then you move up into union with this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist path.
This is where the Buddhists come up with the idea that there is no self, because you move into the voidness of being, and there is no soul, because you transcend the soul, you realize that that's part of the phenomena of the mind, the samsara, the phenomena of creation, but it has no essential reality.
Lawrence: What level is that at?
George: When you're in union with this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist Supercosmic path.
Lawrence: So, they're transcending the soul, and then they decide that there is no soul because they've moved above it.
George: Yeah, that's right. It's just part of its phenomena. There's no inherent reality to it.
Lawrence: That's a very confusing thing to describe to people. But I guess this is the experience that is a result of practicing vipassana at the deepest levels.
George: The issue is that you're disidentifying with each level that you let go of. You disidentify with the phenomena of the Conscious mind, and you discover being. You disidentify with being, you discover that there is a creative process taking place in the higher mind that is essentially creating the phenomena of human life. When you discover where that energy is coming from, you discover that's being projected from some higher level, you even transcend that, then you discover this seed atom on the Vipassana Buddhist path.
In many traditions, they bypass Conscious mind, Metaconscious mind, Superconscious mind, soul, all together, and they simply focus you on the seed atom of their path. Then they say, now you've begun the way. They just tend to skip over the material at those other levels. They don't consider them important. You see the same thing happening in transcendental paths. For example, you have to bring your attention all the way up to the beginning of a transcendental path to begin their path, you unite with the spirit, you identify with that, then you regard everything else as being part of the world of mind that is veiling the presence of the spirit.
It's kind of a similar idea that you get above the illusion or the samsara, and you identify with the true essence, which in the Vipassana path is their Supercosmic seed atom.
Lawrence: And when they complete the Vipassana Supercosmic path, they can choose to liberate that path. That is, achieve liberation from that point of view.
George: Liberation from the standpoint of that seed atom is basically clearing all of the material that's on that track until ultimately you reach your origin or your source, then you experience the great limitless void that is the presence of what they call nirvana.
Lawrence: Without necessarily seeing that there's actually yet further vistas beyond that up at the transcendental levels of the Superconscious mind?
George: Yes, when you go to a chemistry teacher, the chemistry teacher is going to teach you chemistry. They're not going to teach you English or aeronautical engineering. They're going to teach you chemistry. In the same way, a teacher who has gained enlightenment on the Vipassana path. He's not going to teach you about the transcendental or planetary or about the trans-planetary, nor about the subtle. He's going to teach you about that path.
Their job is to get you completed, just like a professor's job is to get you through the class, give you all the instruction, test you to make sure you know your stuff, ultimately to pass the class and graduate. It's a similar idea, but it's done on a higher order.
Lawrence: If we broke basic Vipassana down, step one is to focus the attention in the present time. Step two is to observe and maybe label the contents of awareness. Step three, gain detachment or to disidentify from the contents of awareness. Maybe step four, viewing the contents of awareness as basically an ongoing process that is something other than the state of being that you now inhabit. Are those the four basic steps of Vipassana?
George: Well, you first pick an object of meditation. Where are you going to meditate? I'm going to watch myself walking or I'm going to focus on my breath in the present time. Or I'm going to focus on the sensations in my body. Then you're simply noticing them as they arise. To gain a little bit more detachment, discernment, you can label them, pain in my shoulder, stiffness in my neck.
You're basically noticing what it is as it comes up past us and then a new thing comes up. This is where the idea of impermanence comes from and the idea that everything is always changing. Like you're standing in a river and everything is moving all the time. Then at a certain point, as you process this material, you're actually moving through it. You're moving to a deeper layer, a deeper level. Eventually you have a state of transcendence of that and you move to a deeper state of mind.
This is the way that we view the Vipassana process. There certainly is a detachment that takes place. You're no longer identified with the thinking process, but you're watching the thinking process. You're no longer identified with the sensation process. You're watching the sensations.
Lawrence: Vipassana translates as insight or clear seeing. That kind of suggests that at some point you're going to be able to arrive at a state of consciousness that provides insight or clarity.
Let's say someone who's experiencing extreme depression hears about Vipassana. They start doing Vipassana. What's going to come up for them? ‘I'm so depressed. I can't pay my bills. I don't know what I'm supposed to do’. Whatever the source of the depression is. ‘I lost this. I don't have that’. Depression, depression, depression. Then they begin to identify or label the depression. At some point, hopefully they're going to break through and get to that state of being that we've talked about or no self.
Are they actually going to have clear seeing or insight at that point? Is there actually going to be something that comes from a deeper part of themselves, a more resourceful part of themselves that's going to be able to positively impact their situation? Or not just positively impact, but maybe dramatically change their situation? With insight or clear seeing?
George: The insight process comes by you being able to observe the layers of your depression. You clearly see that, yes, these particular thoughts and beliefs are giving rise to these particular reactions that I'm having. I'm remembering this. I'm crying. I notice that those are related. So that's that insight process. You go through all the layers that make up that depression until finally you reach the other side of it, you're able to transcend it.
In terms of being able to do something about it. Typically, as you begin to engage the self, you may be able to make some choices that are going to relieve aspects of that. If it's a matter of feeling depressed because you're not working, well, maybe you'll find a source of income. You'll work for somebody or you'll provide a service to somebody or you sell something to somebody that will get you some income coming in. This is the executive functions of your Metaconscious mind beginning to kick in and take charge of that. This is the issue - let's solve that problem.
In a deeper sense, when you get up to the wave of the present time, you're clearing a lot of issues up at that level. You're saying, instead of doing this, let's create this instead. You see this a lot in the New Age movement where people talk about creating their destiny, creating their timeline. This is a higher order of the executive functions of the Metaconscious mind. At that level, you're able to look at the entire issue and begin to disassemble it and replace it with something else.
Lawrence: In your writings, you talk about the seven gifts of Raja Vipassana. And you say that Vipassana is an effective form of meditation that brings several benefits to the practitioner that uses it. Specifically, it gives the ability to:
1.) objectively observe the contents of consciousness.
2.) process and release physical pain.
3.) open and release muscular armouring.
That's an interesting one for me. There was a gentleman, Wilhelm Reich, who developed a style of bodywork that targeted this muscular armouring. He would train practitioners to just kind of physically hold points. A lot of times pressing down on the chest for way too long by most people's standards until something would happen. So again, this idea that stuff is held in the body, and here you're calling it muscular armouring. Why do we have that?
George: It's a protective mechanism. We tend to wall off really deep issues because we want to function. If you're processing your issues all the time, you're not very functional. The deeper aspect of the mind, the unconscious mind says, we're going to allow this person to function. But we're going to have to keep this material out of awareness so that, you know, he or she is not overwhelmed by this material.
Lawrence: The body basically becomes a storehouse for stuff we can't deal with.
George: Yes, this is when we talk about the aspect of what we call stored karma. We say that there's an area of your experience where you are conscious. It's filled with light. You are functional. It is integrated. It is connected with a sense of self and a sense of you setting goals in your life and moving forward and expressing your abilities.
This is all non-conflicted versus an area of your mind that is filled with darkness and filled with conflict. It's chaotic, is full of a lot of passions and unfulfilled desires and painful memories. If we're working with those deeper issues like we do in psychotherapy, you're not able to simply function. You're dealing with something else.
In cases of individuals where this unconscious mind begins to just take over, they experience very severe forms of depression or cognitive disorganization, as we see in the schizophrenia or the manic episodes. You lose the faculty of judgment. But we look to this being the reservoir of stored karma. As you're able to work that out, to process it and then actually to transform it through more advanced meditation techniques, you can actually begin to turn that darkness into light. So instead of it being outside of your functional area, it becomes part of your functional area of the mind.
Lawrence: That's a pretty profound potential outcome by using these techniques. Let me finish going through the seven gifts of Raja Vipassana. That was number three, open and release muscular armouring:
4.) experience and release repressed emotions,
5.) gain insight into liminal and unconscious mental processes.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what are liminal and unconscious mental processes?
George: If we think about this area of light and consciousness within us, this functional space, if you will, within a person, where everything is integrated, everything is working together in a coordinated way, which allows you to work and to do all the things that you do in your life. When you move across the threshold into the unconscious, which we call the liminal zone of the mind, the unconscious mind is all of this area of darkness inside of you.
This is a zone of the mind that we normally don't have much contact with. Or if we do have contact with it we try and push it away. We really don't want to deal with that. We don't want to feel those shameful feelings, the feelings of inadequacy, deep frustration and pain in life because we need to be functional. We need to do our jobs. We need to take care of our families. We need to be there for the people in our lives. Unless people invest in therapy when they've got stuff coming up that's bothering them, or they invest in some type of insightive method to begin to look at this material, they basically are keeping this out of consciousness to the best of their ability.
Sigmund Freud said certain elements in the unconscious mind come through. They slip out. And for some people, it's not just a little a little leak here and there. For some people it's like being inundated by a waterfall and they are completely immersed in that. It's very hard for them to use the functional part of their mind.
Lawrence: The last two steps or gifts are:
6.) become aware of cravings, negative passions, such as anger, lust, greed, attachment, jealousy and egotism in the unconscious mind and let go of them.
7.) transcend the unconscious mind into higher states of awareness.
Then you state that transcendence appears to be the end product of this type of meditation. This process, these seven gifts you have listed are not just at one level of the mind, but you've actually developed a very extensive system for exploring and processing multiple aspects of the Superconscious mind, the Metaconscious mind and the Subconscious mind. There's Vipassana techniques that you have for many levels.
George: You're talking about what we call Raja Vipassana. This divided up the journey of self-discovery into three parts. The first would be the processing of the level of the Conscious mind. Then the level of the Subconscious and Metaconscious mind, which are part of this first part of the journey. Then the processing of the level of the soul up to the planetary level of the Superconscious mind and then moving to even higher levels of the Superconscious mind in the trans-planetary, cosmic and supercosmic. Ultimately doing Vipassana on the highest state of consciousness.
In each case, the process is similar in that you have a place where you're focusing the attention, then you begin to process - you begin to become aware of what is arising in the present time of that level. What are you experiencing at that level? Ultimately, what are the karmic impressions that are holding that state of consciousness in place? If you do a full meditation on that and you go through all the different layers, you are eventually going to transcend into even higher states of consciousness. When you're moving through this process of simply notice what's arising in the present time, you can go to deeper and deeper layers of this process. This can be done at multiple levels of the mind.
Lawrence: You developed the Raja-Vipassana course as you've developed other courses because someone asked for it. I know I've asked for things, like your Introduction to Meditation course was one I evoked out of you. In this case, when you developed the Raja vipassana course, it was at the request of a mutual friend of ours in 1987. As usual, you over-delivered in ridiculous fashion. Our friend Skip heard about Vipassana, thought it sounded cool. God knows what his impression of it was at that time. Maybe he was just following the breath. But he asked you to teach a Vipassana course. Instead of introducing a basic course ….follow your breath ….monitor the feelings….monitor the thoughts… You delivered the gargantuan, definitive, over-the-top, advanced Vipassana, Raja-Vipassana course. So, we practiced that course for over a year, Monday nights. We used to do one technique for three weeks, then we would move on to the next technique. And each time we would practice the preceding techniques briefly as we moved up the ladder of this Raja Yoga-styled course.
Your main focus has been Raja Yoga. What inspired you to create this course and how did you choose each section? Because a lot of these sections of mind, the Thousand Petal Lotus Centre, the Black Karmic Lotus Centre, the Three Mountain Centre, the Rainbow Bridge Centre, these are different centres, specific centres that you help people identify through meditation to process in this course. What brought this all together?
George: Well, what happens for me is that I ask a question, ‘what about this?’ Then my higher mind proceeds to give me guidance on this. I recall that I connected with one of the spiritual teachers of the Mudrashram lineage, one of our spiritual guides, he proceeded to say, ‘take dictation’, and I wrote down what he showed me. Then I meditated on each of those things so I could verify that those indeed were valid centres and that I wasn't creating this out of some creative part of my mind. Then I shared it. So that's the way my process works. I ask a question, I get guidance regarding it, I write it down, I edit it, and then I share it.
Lawrence: Why Vipassana? Why not just straight Raja Yoga? Why introduce Vipassana into that Raja Yoga approach?
George: Let me talk about the dimensional levels of the mind, the dimensional focus of what we call the attention. The first levels we can say, I can focus on a point, this is a focal point, I can move my attention from the waking state of consciousness to the movement awareness centre, and I can lock into that focal point. The next thing that happens is you start to become aware of that centre, you start to be able to contemplate, you start to be able to become aware of the content that's at that level.
The third state is when you begin to get a sense that this is a form or a body. This is where we find the idea that this is a shape or it's a form or it's a vehicle of consciousness where this is operating. The fourth stage is you start to monitor what's arising in the present time. Now straight Raja Yoga meditation is going to focus on the focal point, maybe contemplate, so the first two aspects of it. Whereas when you go deeper into the actual experience at that level, you're moving to that fourth stage where Vipassana takes place.
It is adding to the basic awareness that you get by doing Raja Yoga, by dropping deeper into the Vipassana state where you're having the experience in the present time, you're moving from one dimension to two dimensions when you become aware of the content arising. Three dimensions, you’re aware of form. Fourth dimension, you're aware of time. Fifth dimension you're aware of a transcendent centre that integrates that particular level of experience.
It's valuable that people learn about mindfulness, which is when you collect your attention and you are present. And to learn about Vipassana, which is the ability to begin to process things in the present time and to let them go and release them. This is a small subset of what we teach in integral meditation. If you had a handyman come to your house and you said, I need you to fix the window, it's jammed. I need you to replace that light bulb up there. My son made a hole in the wall. I need you to patch that. The handyman smiled and said, yes, I have a hammer. You would feel very uncomfortable that he didn't have the proper tool to do the job.
Vipassana is a wonderful tool, but it is only one tool of many that you need to work on the different issues that arise to do the work of transcendence and transformation. That's what we teach in integral meditation, starting with our Introduction to Meditation program.
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