Guided By Spirits
Liv Gaborit is a social scientist with a background in psychology who worked with DIGNITY (the Danish Institute for Human Rights) and conducted a study on the impact of vipassana meditation courses in Insein Prison in the tradition of SN Goenka. It was highly unusual that Gaborit, as a foreigner, was granted permission by prison authorities to study their impact, which she did prior to the coup. In her study, which she talked about on a recent podcast, she found that prisoners who had gone through the meditation retreats described being visited by spirits… and yet described these experiences calmly, while prisoners who had been in solitary confinement and had similar experiences relayed them as difficult to make sense of and causing great suffering, even going so far as to characterize it as torture. These findings suggest that the setting in which these experiences take place, including the presence or absence of support and guidance, can significantly impact how an individual perceives and reacts to such experiences.
In particular, and tragically, hearing this story today reminds us to keep the many political prisoners that the Burmese military continues to harm in our hearts and minds and to consider the ways in which we can support and advocate for them. This may involve raising awareness about their situation, advocating for their rights and well-being, or providing practical support such as financial aid.
“Those three things, to have a guide; to have a community; and whether it’s voluntary or forced, that turned out to make a major difference. Even such that it makes it a matter of life and death.”
“These prisoners who had gone through the meditation retreats talked about being visited by spirits. These stories reminded me of what I heard from some of the prisoners who had been in solitary confinement. They [too had] talked about hearing voices and about seeing things, but they didn't say they were visited by spirits. They had a harder time making sense of their experiences; they suffered because of them, even described it as torture. The yogis, on the other hand, they described it quite calmly. How can they describe something that sounds so similar and then have such different experiences? How can what is torture for one [person] be just an everyday experience for another, simply because of the setting? What is it in this setting that makes it so different?
Host: Right, and what did you find out as you conducted the survey?
As I looked into it, I realized how important it is to have someone to guide you through an experience like a meditation. It can either be the guide from the book you read, or the meditation teacher you have, or at the retreats, the Dhamma talks they hear every night, someone who helps you [to] make sense of the experience. And what I found quite interesting at the retreats, and also [during] the one that I sat through myself outside [of] the prison, is that when you ask the meditation teachers how to make sense of these experiences, they don't really give you an answer. They tell you that it's normal, [to] just continue and you will succeed. Just kind of that confirmation that everything is okay, [it] was enough for these experiences to settle down and not run out of control. So, firstly, I found the importance of having someone to guide you - what the theory would say is [call, refer to as] a ‘master of ceremony,’ someone who takes your hand and takes you through the experience.
And then the second thing is that the yogis had a shared community. If they had these experiences [of] being visited by a spirit during a meditation, and they felt uncomfortable, they could open their eyes. And they would see that they were surrounded by people who were sitting calmly. And just being surrounded by people who were doing the same [thing] and who appeared calm, [that] was also enough to calm people down. Whereas, in solitary confinement, there's nothing. There is not even anything to look at, besides the four walls of your cell; there's no [other] stimulus. So here, people would instead start to see things, just to make up things because there was no thing that stimulated their visual senses.
And then lastly, there was the difference that the yogis chose to be there themselves. They had chosen to go into meditation; they had chosen to sit through this retreat. And even though the discipline and the daily schedule in the retreats was actually stricter than the schedule outside in the rest of the prison. It was something they had chosen to subject themselves to, compared to the people in solitary confinement, who actually didn't have a very demanding schedule. On the other hand, they [the non-meditators] have a lot of free time to just sit and think and hear these voices. But they were under conditions that they had been forced to be under. And they had no community to get support from, except for whatever their mind could conjure up. And those three things, to have a guide; to have a community; and whether it's voluntary or forced, that turned out to make a major difference. Even [such that] it makes it a matter of life and death.”