Sun, 13 Aug 2006
Best Left Unsaid
It's been a busy weekend. Lama Gursam has been visiting Baltimore. After he leaves, he'll do a one month retreat in upstate New York. He says that he'll be back in Baltimore in October. And today we had the homeopathic study group picnic. I'll write more about both later. For now I want to make a final comment on what Susan has written.
But the real mystery for me is the difference in intensity and suffering between Christians and Buddhists. St. John is not speaking of something that "is sometimes painful." He is talking about anguish, extended mental pain that he says is "truly beyond all description."
This is heavy stuff, and I have to say I just don't find this in the biographies I've read of the masters in my own tradition, or other Tibetan Buddhist lineages. This is what has puzzled me in the past.
I really can't speak on what Christian meditators go through. But I have been through some pretty tough times in my meditation. I don't want to write about it right now, maybe some day if I feel it could help people. But what I think Susan is overlooking is that there's a lot of stuff that goes on in meditation that's never written down anywhere. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that describing what happens in your meditation is usually not good for you or for the person that hears it. So much goes unsaid, let alone written down. The second reason is that the lore of how to teach students meditation is not written down in books. Part of it comes from experience and part comes from the oral instructions of the teacher. I'm not a meditation instructor but I hear questions about practice on the Internet. Usually it's not difficult to answer them from my own experience. There's no need to write the answers down in a book so it can be consulted and there's considerable risk in writing such a book. So you can't assume that because Buddhist biographies or meditation texts don't talk about a dark night of a soul that Buddhists don't experience any such thing.
