Inward

Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self

Michal Pagis

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226639413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis's Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

1

Turning Inward

Interiority has come into its own. More and more people are looking inward, toward their minds and bodies. This gaze is oriented through different channels and practices, many of which are based on religious or spiritual traditions. Inward is about one such practice: vipassana, a Buddhist meditation of mindfulness that involves a nonjudgmental or detached observation of the body and mind.

The practice of vipassana and the microsociological world that surrounds it form the core of this book. Yet the reader will be taken far beyond vipassana itself. In my inquiry, vipassana is used as a window onto the complex relations between bodies, selves, and social worlds. Through examining the phenomenological reality of vipassana practitioners, their silent interactions in meditation centers, their heightened sensitivity to the body, and their attempts to transform themselves and their social lives by monitoring bodily sensations, I supply a sociological framework for the study of the place of embodied awareness in processes of self-making. Such a framework enhances our understanding of the connection between inner self-relations and self-other relations, and of the role of the visceral body in linking the two.

What does it mean to look inward? What do we find when we do so? This is a challenging question, because the notion of inwardness implies an inversion of the usual direction of attention in everyday life. Generally attention is focused on the world in which one acts, that is, the world outside oneself. On a personal level, this world might be the text I am writing, the game I am playing, or the conversation I am having with a friend. In the course of such daily action, I am tacitly aware of different aspects of the embodiment of the self—adjusting my fingers on the keyboard when misspelling a word, feeling a pain in my back and moving in order to relieve it, noticing anger rising up and trying to control my desire to shout. This awareness is kept at the background of action and behavior in the world, as my focused attention is set on interaction with other people and things.

As social beings, we interact in the world with an awareness of how others perceive us. Thus in everyday interaction one diverts attention to one’s body, emotion, or behavior in order to adjust to, or influence, others’ perceptions of us. While such awareness of the embodiment of the self is key for social interaction, it is mostly under wraps, kept at the background of awareness, a base from which one attends to the world. It is the world that is at the focal point of attention, not one’s interiority.

The kind of inward looking that this book investigates turns such activity inside out. It puts interiority at the focal point of attention, as a subject of interest in and of itself. Such inward looking may have a goal or vision that is connected to action in the world—one might go to a psychotherapist and speak about one’s emotions in order to be a better mother. Or one might practice yoga in order to modulate one’s reactions to feeling frustrated or anxious over the course of the day. But the situated practice of looking inward is distinct from daily action and engagement. It entails a diversion of attention away from the world and toward the self. Moreover, when we so divert our attention, we start “finding things.” I, for example, discover emotions, thoughts, and sensations that are new to me and that are now becoming a part of who I am. My inner sphere expands as a whole world of interiority is revealed.

It is the diversion of attention away from daily engagement, the break in the flow of daily life that takes place during the gaze inward, that makes it such a compelling case for sociological inquiry. If we take seriously the sociological insight that the self is always embedded in social relations and interactions, then we are confronted with the question: what kinds of social worlds and social relations emerge when people adopt practices that shift their focus inward, toward the invisible dimensions of our being?

The challenge that such inward-looking practices present to sociological inquiry has led to a concern among sociologists that the “subjective turn” that characterizes modern culture represents a dissolution of the social fabric, with people becoming antisocial, overly individualistic, and perhaps even narcissistic.1 However, such notions ignore the growing institutionalization of inward looking in social spheres that are becoming a central part of our society. These spheres are weaving new social fabrics and even creating new communities.

This book offers a microsociological account of one such inward-looking practice, an account that reveals that the turn inward relies on the surrounding social interactive sphere and thus cannot be characterized as antisocial or solitary. The reader will learn that the turn inward calls for the cultivation of a new relation, a new dialectic, between self and other, between self and the social world. A society of inward-looking individuals requires particular social relations, particular modes of social interaction that supply the collective base from which individuals explore their own subjectivity.

Meditation offers an extreme case of the turn inward because, more than other introspective techniques, it involves a radical turn away from the world. This is because meditation is not language based. The turn to meditation, and with it other bodily based practices, shows a shift from the previously popular “talking cure” (e.g., psychoanalysis) to corporeal methods that turn toward interiority.

Theories on the social base of introspection tend to stress language. Language is a shared symbolic system that is by definition social. We learn our words from other people. Our conversations with others serve as the basis of our conversations with ourselves. Indeed language is a natural candidate for the production of self-reflection, since it has an easily accessible reflexive capacity. Through language one can speak about oneself with others, produce biographical narratives, and engage in inner dialogues. G. H. Mead went so far as to claim, “I know of no other form of behavior than the linguistic in which the individual is an object to himself, and so, as far as I can see, the individual is not a self in the reflexive sense unless he is an object to himself.”2

The notion that language is the primary channel through which individuals explore themselves is evident in many self-reflective practices and techniques in contemporary Western culture. Foucault’s inquiry into the power of self-verbalization, originating from the practice of confession and migrating into the consulting room, offers various examples.3 The therapeutic discourse, which is based on the talking cure and with it on improving communication skills, rests on what Eva Illouz has dubbed the “textualization of subjectivity.”4 We talk about ourselves, we write in diaries, we write blogs, we go to therapists and life coaches, we engage in endless conversations about who we are.

Alongside practices that are based on verbalization of the self, however, other self-reflexive techniques have penetrated the contemporary culture of self-introspection. In the main, these techniques stem from societies that are suspicious of language as a medium for self-knowledge. They prefer a different medium for turning inward—the medium of the body. Yoga, meditation, healing, and alternative medicine are just a few examples of practices that turn to the body in order to produce self-knowledge, self-mastery, and self-grounding.

In contrast to practices of inward looking that rely on the inherent reflexive capacity of language and symbols, bodily based introspective techniques rely on the reflexive capacity of the body. Such practices involve awareness of processes of meaning-making that are embedded within the somatic level. Somatic or embodied meaning-making processes have received much sociological attention in the past several decades.5 Yet embodied semiotics is usually understood as subconscious and habitual, captured by the notion of “habitus,” a dimension of self that is hidden from direct reflection.6 Taking a totally different tack, bodily based introspective techniques transform this dimension of selfhood into an overt subject of awareness. These practices, vipassana meditation among them, are cultural-specific ways that bring the tacit “inner lining” of experience to the forefront of attention, rendering it a subject of reflection and manipulation.

What is tacit about the inner lining of experience? Of course we routinely attend to our bodies. But this attention is recruited to action in the world. My interaction with you follows bodily cues and nonverbal responses and expressions. If I see you are having a difficult time listening, I might raise my voice or change my tone. I search your response for indications regarding my “self,” I attend to the “me” that is reflected back to me, adjusting my body accordingly. If you smile at me and I interpret this smile as a friendly gesture, I will smile back. If you smile at me and I sense an attempt to humiliate me, I will react in shame or anger.

Self-awareness in interaction requires a dialectic movement between self and other, between attending to the external social world and attending to the body as a base from which action takes place.7 In this dialectic movement, the inner lining of experience is tacit. I do not concentrate on my breath or on the tension in my muscles. My breath, my muscle tension, and my heartbeat act as a base for my behavior and are available for reflection, but during interaction are not the primary objects of attention.

Now, imagine starting to tilt this dialectic in a way that the body becomes more central to my attention, while others and the social world turn into aids or anchors from which I investigate my body. So when I feel my muscles contracting into a smile, instead of focusing on your response to my smile, I divert my attention to these muscles. Or when I touch you, instead of focusing on how you feel, I shift my attention to how my hand feels while touching you. Or when I talk to you, instead of focusing on your responses to my words, I focus on the sound of my voice or the movement of my tongue.

This is not an easy task. As an experiment, try touching the end of this book, or the end of tablet on which you are reading the electronic version of this book, and feel it—it is most likely smooth and straight. Now try to feel your finger touching the book or the tablet. This is quite complicated. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “the moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and never does the perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving.”8 Instead of simply feeling the world, you are trying to feel yourself feeling the world. This requires attending to the inner lining of experience, which normally serves as a background to our actions.

Such an inversion of the usual order of attention for prolonged and condensed periods does not jibe well with mundane social life. Vipassana meditation and other such inward-looking practices originated in relatively monastic spheres and were not designed to be practiced by the masses. To borrow Weber’s typology of religion, meditative practices represent a religious “flight” from the world.9 In Buddhist terms, vipassana tries to expose “ultimate reality,” a reality quite distinct from the conventional one. This is why meditative practices were traditionally done either in solitude or in the company of other monks, and accompanied by renunciation, withdrawing from the everyday social order and joining an alternative one.

Recent years have seen a growing attempt to integrate meditation into conventional life. Long meditation retreats and daily practice of meditation are becoming increasingly common, with individuals keen on cultivating the ability to track the inner lining of experience, to feel themselves feeling the world.

How can we account for such allocation of time and energy to this effort? What do people find when they divert their attention to the inner lining of experience? What kind of alternative social order enables such process of cultivation? How do people utilize the practice of meditation and extend it to their daily lives? What kind of tensions and resonances then emerge? And last, what can the inversion of attention in vipassana meditation teach us about relations between self-body-other in other contexts?

The Journey

Sitting at his office at a major American university, Peter, a professor of computer science, recalls what attracted him to vipassana.10 Several years ago he sought something that could help him, or as he puts it, provide answers to the questions that he had about life. Having a Quaker father, he had encountered meditation in the past: “I wasn’t raised with that directly but that was present, that was part of my secondhand experience, and I have gone to that a couple of times.” Yet he was not interested in religious belief or a religious community and felt quite remote from Christianity. He read some Buddhist texts and tried learning meditation from books, but he found that “reading about it doesn’t do anything. . . . Even if you try it once then you have doubts—‘wow, this doesn’t look as amazing as they said it would be’—and then you don’t do it again.” When he heard about a ten-day vipassana retreat from a friend, who described the course as a “meditation boot camp,” he decided to give it a try: “The moment I heard this description I knew I really needed it, since it forces you to try the teaching now. So other teachings pointed towards it, but without the structure to make it happen, it is extremely difficult, I think, for people to get very far in it, to really understand it, to really confront it.”

A chilly spring day several weeks hence finds me entering the meditation hall at the vipassana meditation center in Illinois, near the city of Rockford. The center used to be a small countryside farm, and the meditation hall was originally a residential house, whose inner walls were torn down to create a large open space. Besides the meditation hall, the center includes a kitchen and dining hall, dorms for retreat participants, and dorms for the volunteer staff and teachers, each facility located in a separate building and connected by walking trails.

I remove my shoes at the entrance to the meditation hall, then slowly and quietly take my seat on a small meditation cushion and mattress. The lights are dim as I peer around at the unadorned white walls. Less than two feet away other meditators sit on similar mattresses and cushions. The hall, which could hold fifty people, is not full. I recognize Peter from afar, on the male side of the hall, but conforming to the norm of silence, I do not gesture to him. A moment later the meditation teacher enters and sits down on a higher seat at the front of the hall. Facing the meditators and without a word, he presses a button. The sound of recorded chanting begins, followed by the familiar voice of the head teacher S. N. Goenka instructing me to concentrate on my breath. I close my eyes and enter meditation.

A year later, on the other side of the Atlantic, I am again sitting, this time in the comfortable living room of a house located in an upscale Israeli suburb, interviewing Sharon, mother of two and successful self-employed graphic designer. I had met Sharon several months earlier at the Israeli vipassana meditation center in Hazeva, a small village in the desert. We shared a room at a ten-day meditation retreat with two other students, yet we had exchanged not a single word. In the meditation hall I could see Sharon in the row in front of me, meditating silently. Our eyes would meet in the room while we waited for the shower or in the dining hall as we stood in line for food, but all I knew about her was her name and that this was her fourth meditation retreat. Only on the last day, when the participants were allowed to speak, did we find ourselves in deep conversation.

Sharon offers me tea along with a retrospective of her encounter with vipassana.11 Three years ago, when she and her husband had been at a coffee shop with friends, one friend, “who is totally not a spiritual person, a very material person, works in marketing, who was very stressed at that time,” told them that he had decided to “do something for relaxation, to go to a ten-day silent vipassana retreat in the desert.” This was the first time she had ever heard the word vipassana, but something about this ten-day silence attracted her, and she found herself saying, “You know what, that suits me too—I also want to go.” The timing was perfect in terms of work, she recounts, and she felt lucky that a space suddenly opened up in the already-full registration. Sharon recalls that she had no sense of what awaited her: “When I got there, I realized I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. I did not know vipassana was a type of meditation; it was a complete surprise that you sit silently with yourself—and that is it.” When she went to the first retreat, she did not think she would ever attend another, yet something in the experience captivated her. She tried meditating at home alone, but finding that her focus diminished with time, she decided to join a weekly group vipassana sitting. Family- and work-related pressures shot up over the year, and eventually she decided to return to the meditation center for another vipassana retreat.

Sharon and Peter are two among many vipassana practitioners I met during my fieldwork. For three years I conducted extensive participant observation in the two vipassana centers described above and in weekly vipassana groups in the vicinity of Chicago and Tel Aviv. Together with the Massachusetts vipassana center (visited briefly) and myself as an autoethnographical field site, these people and spaces form the backbone of this book. The fieldwork continued sporadically for another five years as I periodically contacted practitioners for informal follow-up conversations.

The choice for research in Israel and the United States stems from my own biography. In 2002, three years before I embarked on this research, I participated in a ten-day vipassana course in Israel, my home country, at the same meditation center where a few years later I met Sharon. I had long been interested in trying meditation, and a friend recommended vipassana. I had some background in yoga and tai chi, both of which are practiced in circles where meditation is highly regarded. This prior taste of vipassana sparked my sociological curiosity, mainly because I perceived a resonance between the meditative attitude and phenomenological/constructivist sociological perspectives. Yet at that time I had no intention of turning vipassana into an object of sociological investigation, and I continued to practice it sporadically without returning to meditation retreats.

Fast-forward three years: I was studying at the University of Chicago when the first vipassana meditation center opened near Chicago, using the teaching method I had learned in Israel—vipassana meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka. This captured my attention, and I discovered meditation groups dotting the university campus, including a vipassana group. Mindfulness was on the rise, becoming a visible social phenomenon. No longer confined to alternative circles, it called out for sociological inquiry.

In Israel I saw that a similar process was taking place: meditation was entering the mainstream. At this point I felt the time was ripe for me to embark on this study.12 The...