Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
In keeping with the theme of Jeff's lastest post, Never Disparaging, I came across a documentary about using Vipassana meditation in prisons. Excerpt follows:
During the following winter of 1994-95, the Israeli filmmakers traveled to both Tihar and to the Baroda Jail in the India state of Gujarat, at which Vipassana courses had also been conducted. There they conducted and filmed extensive interviews with jail officials, including Karin Bedi, and inmates from many different countries who participated in the courses. The result of these efforts was an extremely powerful 52-minute documentary film entitled Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. The film describes the way in which Vipassana has been sucessfully used within the Indian prison system to dramatically change the behaviour and attitude of the inmates and jailers who participated in the courses and, thereby, improve the entire atmosphere of the prisons.
Read the article, it is very interesting--Vipissana meditation is what is generally practiced by Therevada Buddhists (like me), along with Anapanasati meditation. I first studied the techniques under the supervision of Thanissaro Bhikkhu in '95(?).
"Never Disparaging" is a skill like any other skill. It can be learned, and it can be taught. And if the implications of the series of prison experiences above is to be believed, it can have a profound social impact in communities where there is generally little or no hope of positive change.
It is also an attitude (yes, I realize I'm using "attitude" in the sense that Karl H. Potter does w/r/t Indian Philosophy, which means it's a bit of a Eurocentric usage) we can direct towards ourselves. In other words, we can learn to not not disparage ourself, too.
Part of he process is learning to live in the present fully. And what I mean, and what Buddhism means, by that "fully" has nothing to do with using a "portion" of ourselves (e.g. our feelings or thoughts) as the primary criteria for how we view the present. Or to put it in Buddhist parlance, we shouldn't identify too closely with one of the five khandhas ("aggregates") like vedana ("feelings") or sa?khara ("mental formations"/"thoughts").
To illustrate with a simile, identifying with one of the khandhas is like identifying with a part of (e.g. your arm) of your body. I used to hyperbolically demonstrate the falsity of the dichotomy of being either a "right-brained person" or "left-brained person" (much to the mortified delight of one of my friends who was studying psychology at DePauw) by "limping" around while pretending that one half of my body was paralyzed.
So I'm qualifying "living in the present" with "fully" because that implies not being attached to any impermanent subset of our bodies, minds, or experiences. How does this help us to learn how not to disparage someone (even ourselves)?
Well, part of that has to deal with what identifying with a khandhas implies--the ownership, if you will, of "parts of ourself." With feelings of ownership (or attachment) comes the concommitant responses and reactions to anything that infringes on that "property." We can see this in some of the linguistic usages we have: at least in English--a number of Asian languages formulate these usages very differently, which is not surprising since most currently practiced meditative traditions evolved in Asian countries.
But for exmple, I might say:
A) "My feelings were hurt" or
B) "You hurt my feelings" which are roughly equivalent to the statements:
A') "I was hurt" or
B') "You hurt me," respectively.
The implication of A) and B) being something to the effect of stating "I own my feelings" (the usage of the possesive pronoun "my"), and for A') and B'), for at least the duration of the particular event that 'caused' the 'hurting' "I am the same as my feelings" (I have identified myself with my feelings).
In Buddhist thought, our 'feelings' are just an aggregate, and never identical to us AND we don't really own them. A bundle of a particular set of experiences we've named that we've attached ourselves to is another way to put it. It could be said that one of the reasons the practice of meditation is generally silent, or at least, "non-verbal" is just so that we can get away from reinforcing verbal forms of identification (and reference) that are, in the context of Buddhist thought, illusory (cf. Hotei pointing).
The general idea here is certainly a part of the soteriology of Buddhism. The thing is, Buddhism has developed a practice to help achieve, if not a means to ultimate detachment from dukkha ("suffering" being a terrible translation of dukkha) for those skeptical of a Buddhist worldview, then at least a means to detachment from day to day suffering.
For more info about the individual and social benefits of meditation, see this.