Vipassana for Hackers [pdf]
This paper is a pretty comprehensive take on Vipassana, so in case anyone&#x27;s looking for something a bit more general, I&#x27;d like to offer a complementary summary based on my own experiences.<p>Vipassana is a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Silent in this case really means distraction-free, entertainment-free, or stimulation-free. Think of it as the diametric opposite of social news. No noise, no conversation, no instant gratification, no easy pleasures (not even reading, writing or music). You just eat, sleep and meditate, with occasional breaks in between.<p>During the course you see other students and listen to recorded meditation lessons, but you are, effectively, alone. It&#x27;s a cultural trope that having nothing but your own mind for company sends you a bit mad, and in my experience that was basically true. Normally you can count on the distraction stream to save you from your own thoughts, and without it you can spend days stuck in ever-intensifying thought loops with nothing to break you out of them.<p>Which, to me, gets to the heart of Vipassana. It&#x27;s not really about silence; it&#x27;s a specific kind of meditation designed to change your relationship to sensation. I think of it like audio engineering: we have a gain control on what we feel, and when the sensations get too much we turn them down until we&#x27;re comfortable again. The problem is that you turn down everything at once; distracting yourself from painful experiences also distracts you from pleasurable ones. Keep turning the gain down and you eventually end up with a featureless experience: no peaks or troughs, just a flat line.<p>The reason you start with silence is because you&#x27;re going to turn the gain back up, and you don&#x27;t want to blow out your speakers at the first loud noise. The technique focuses on bodily sensations, but since sensations are mental and physical everything kinda comes along for the ride. You spend hours focusing on the most minute feelings until they fill your entire mind and your whole world is an area of skin the size of a postage stamp. It can get pretty intense.<p>But what makes it <i>too</i> intense? You do. It&#x27;s not like bad news is painful because it melts your auditory nerves. Rather, you react to the sound, then you react to your reaction, then you react to that reaction and so on until you&#x27;ve built this unbearable feedback loop. Then you turn down the gain because, damn, that was LOUD. But that&#x27;s bad engineering; you gotta go fix the feedback at the source. And that means unlearning your reactions.<p>That was my core experience of Vipassana. Turn up the sensation, learn to accept the sensation. Feel more, react less, repeat. Everything I tried to avoid thinking about, I thought about. Everything I didn&#x27;t want to feel, I felt. I was defenceless as my self-sabotaging thought patterns sabotaged me over and over until I realised I was the one doing it and I could just... stop.<p>It&#x27;s easy to dwell on the hard parts, but it was often quite peaceful. I spent an hour watching a family of lizards (they hid until I&#x27;d been still for fifteen minutes), another watching the finches chase each other and listening to their tiny wings, and another just looking at trees. Have you ever noticed how <i>green</i> trees are? I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d seen anything that green since I was a child.