‘Don't get distracted by meditative anomaly!’
In this passage from a recent podcast conversation, Tempel Smith reflects on a profound meditative experience he had years ago. He explains that at the time, he didn't have a framework or language to understand what was happening to him. Following Goenka's instructions, he focused his attention on his breath and swept it through his body, disregarding any meditative anomalies that arose. Through this innocent and unstructured approach, his mind went through stages of insight, including moments of disillusionment and a possible cessation experience. However, without context or a way to articulate his experiences to others, he moved on. Looking back on the experience now, he recognizes the impact it had on his mind and his understanding of the self. It severed his belief that happiness could be achieved by sorting out his personality and gaining control over impermanence. He realized the futility of adding self constructs to the flow of experience and saw the potential for liberation in the absence of a fixed reference point of self.
“I didn’t have the map, but it really did sever a belief that my happiness could be worked out by sorting out my personality.”
“These phenomenal experiences happened. And it was only seven years later that I would even have a map for what had happened. I tumbled through these very deep classical Theravadan meditative steps and meditative liberation practice, just by following the simple Goenka instruction. And when I went up to report to the person leading the retreat, all they would ask me is how long can I keep my attention under my nose? Could I do it for a certain length of time? And I had no language for these experiences. And so I would report like, ‘Yeah, it's sort of average. You know, like I keep my attention to my nose sometimes for several breaths, sometimes longer.’ And he said, ‘Good, just keep going and have faith.’ So I would go back and sit down, and then tumble through another stage on the progress of Insight, but not make much of it.
Because the whole thing was, ‘Don't get distracted by meditative anomaly!’
Just keep sweeping your attention through your body, which made the going through the progress of insight very innocent, and not something structured, not something I could have forced my mind to do. What I was forcing my mind to do was to sweep from head to toe, and not get lost in that process. So when my mind tumbled through arising and passing, tumbled through disillusion, tumbled through these stages - and not every one [of them] happened, but enough of them happened in that progression – then having a cessation moment. Which I make no claims about, because you can't measure those things, whether it was a small cessation moment, that's indicative of a larger one that's meant to come, or whether that was a classical cessation moment.
But because my mind went through this progress of insight, and had something like a cessation moment, all I can say is that, at some level of depth, my mind went through a classical progress of insight experience. And that could have just been a very shallow relationship to the progress of insight and what would have really been liberative is if I'd had more submersion in each one of those steps. Or whether that was an actual A-to-Z progress of insight with a classical cessation moment. I had zero context around it, no way to think about it, no way to talk with other people.
I remember trying to describe it, with the language I had the time, to my other friends on the retreat. And they just sort of tossed their hands up, there's like, ‘Yeah, weird things happen.’ So, I just moved on from that. But I look back on it.
When I look back on that experience, now 25 years later, the way that impacted my mind, also, is very classical. It's so interesting, I didn't have the map, but it really did sever a belief that my happiness could be worked out by sorting out my personality. A belief that there was a way to sort out all these fluctuating experiences, that you could get better and better at life, so that the way all this impermanence happens out of your control, you can finally be such a good conductor of all these fluctuating experiences that you could establish your happiness by getting a little bit more influence over impermanence.
To have an experience, which I haven't repeated to that same depth, of there being absence of a reference of ‘self.’ And then seeing how much that self just gums up everything. And up to that point, self is your attempt to lend some organization to the chaos. But there is a meditative step where you don't add self constructs to the flow of what's happening. It's like an eight cylinder engine that's misfiring on four of its cylinders, and all of a sudden, all eight cylinders are firing, and you know something that is outside of convention.”