Among the tricks recommended in the voluminous online “how-to-blog-more-regularly” literature is: Write ‘em ahead of time and set ‘em up to post automatically in the future. I’m going to try that as a way of clearing out some of the stuff that’s been sitting around in my Drafts folder for a long time.
First up: For a while a couple of years ago, Slate had a feature called Meaning of Life TV, in which Robert Wright interviewed a variety of interesting people. At one point I downloaded the transcript of the interview with Joseph Goldstein; I’ve cleaned up the text some and divided into post-sized chunks. The first chunk appears below; I’m going to try to schedule the remaining installments to appear automatically over the next few days. We’ll see how that goes.
Joseph Goldstein: At the end of my two years in Thailand I was just sitting in the garden of a friend who was reading from a Tibetan text and conditions just happened to come together. My mind was really concentrated, there was a lot of clarity and awareness;, and just from listening to the text something happened. There was a really transformative moment of understanding, of insight, of realization — whatever you want to call it. And that was before I had done any extensive meditative practice. I had just begun sort of exploring; so in some way my path has been catching up to that experience.
Wright: To recapture that moment?
Joseph Goldstein: Not so much to recapture it, but to develop the meditative skills which would allow it to flower. So the real transformation of understanding began then, rather than going on a long path working up to a moment of transformation.
. . .
Wright: Okay. I take it it was a good feeling? Or was it just a true feeling?
Joseph Goldstein: It was a true feeling. Yes, it was mostly a true feeling. At first it was — I wouldn’t say it was a good feeling — at first it was an earthquake.
Wright: And it felt like insight? Now you are seeing the truth?
Joseph Goldstein: Yes.
Wright: And the truth was that in some sense the sensory world is an illusion, or is not quite the most fundamental thing?
Joseph Goldstein: That, plus the sense that on the most fundamental level, experience does not refer back to an I.
Wright: Experience does not refer back to an I.
Joseph Goldstein: Right. I mean mostly we go through life with the sense of I’m thinking, I’m seeing, I’m hearing, I’m feeling. All experience kind of comes back like that. Through that moment, it was like experience became like this rather than this. It wasn’t self-referential.
Wright: Okay. Now I see what you mean; that you got there right away and then had to back up and try to get there again.
Joseph Goldstein: Not so much “get there again”, as integrate it and let the implications of it develop. Because I see that as the beginning, not the end. It’s not that all notions of self were uprooted. There are a lot of old habit patterns that go very deep. And so those kept emerging, but my way of understanding them was radically changed.
(continued here.)
meditation
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