Tricycle | Awake in the World

Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (both in Barre, Massachusetts), has been leading retreats in the vipassana tradition of Southeast Asia for nearly twenty years. His teachers include Anagarika Munindra, S. N. Goenka, Dipa Ma, and the Venerable V Pandita Sayadaw of Burma. He is the author of The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation. His new book, Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom, was published by Shambhala in the fall.

This interview was conducted by editor Helen Tworkov at IMS in October.

Tricycle: After leading nineteen three-month retreats, what inspires you to keep at it?

Goldstein: In the last few years I've taken more time, two or three months each year, to reimmerse myself in practice in an intensive way. It is tremendously energizing to reconnect to what the teaching is all about, to why I got into it in the first place.

Tricycle: What is it all about?

Goldstein: For me the Buddha's teaching is about freedom and the qualities that come from that freedom, like kindness and compassion. I see those situations where my mind is open and spacious and responsive, and the times when my mind contracts around something. The difference between those two experiences is so clear. The possibility of freedom, though, is contingent on seeing when the mind contracts or gets distracted and lost in the story.

Tricycle: Can you give an example?

Goldstein: A simple example is when we go to the movies and become totally absorbed in the film. Then there is the moment when we step out of the theater and experience that sudden reality shift, a mini-awakening to where we really are.

In the same way we are often lost in the movies of our mind. There's a Zen story about a hermit monk who painted a tiger on the walls of his cave. He painted it so realistically that when he finished, he looked at it and became frightened. It takes practice to wake up, to emerge from our mind-created worlds. This makes being with people and situations in a fresh way each time possible. That's the joy of teaching and why it doesn't get stale.

Tricycle: Do you think the American involvement with psychology makes us more attached to our stories?

Goldstein: Not really. I think it is in the nature of life itself. Basically the biggest story, the most fundamental story, is the idea of self. We weave everything around that. It's what keeps the wheel of samsara going.

Tricycle: If a meditation teacher suggests that you set your story aside and follow the breath and relax into a kind of choice less discrimination, and then, suddenly, tremendous psychological material comes up, what do you do with your story?

Goldstein: Perhaps a difference between the therapeutic approach and the meditative one is that in therapy one might explore the content of the story, examining the particular circumstances around the thoughts and emotions arising, while in meditation we would explore the very nature of thought or emotion. What does anger or sadness or happiness feel like? How is it manifesting? One of my early teachers, Munindra-ji, said something that has stayed with me over all these years. He said, "The thought your mother is not your mother; it is a thought." The thought itself is insubstantial. It is our attachment to the content that makes it so solid.

Tricycle: Is there one area in which the therapeutic and the meditative processes comes together?

Goldstein: There are many areas in which the two processes help one another. One, in particular, stands out. In order to free the mind from the contraction of identification with thoughts and emotions, there needs to be acceptance. If we're not allowing ourselves to feel them, that very resistance feeds them and locks them in. If, as different thoughts and feelings arise, we have the ability to be accepting, then it is possible to approach them with a meditative perspective, simply letting them come and go. A therapeutic approach can help us become more accepting, especially with deeply rooted patterns of conditioning.

The nature of awareness is not tainted. If one is actually resting in awareness, resting in the nature of the mind then one is feeling the emotion—grief, sorrow, joy, peace—but instead of identifying with it, the mind simply rests in the awareness of whatever arises.

Tricycle: In that resting there's no suggestion that we should let go of the feelings themselves?

Goldstein: We don't have to let go, we simply have to not hold on. Freedom is to be able to feel without the added notion of identification that "this is me," "this is who I am." Because it's not. A phrase one of my teachers used to describe the meditative experience is "empty phenomena rolling on." And that's really what's happening. It's empty phenomena with no one behind it, no one to whom it is happening. The problem is that we get attached or react in aversion and that's where we get caught in the story.

Tricycle: Did your understanding of self and story come through Buddhism alone? Or can you look back to other experiences that were congruent with Buddhist training?

Goldstein: When I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand and just getting into practice, I was reading Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, and some of the Pali canon at the same time. Basically the insight that Proust had, which inspired his masterpiece, was that the past is in the present. The only way we know the past is as an experience in the present moment. A thought, a smell, a memory is something happening right now that we are calling "past." We don't experience the past outside the thought of the present moment. Then my mind made this jump. Well, if the past is like that, that must be what the future is like, too. There is just the thought in the moment. The whole burden of past and future, of time, of time-created stories, all collapsed into a simple thought in the moment. To relate to the moment is so simple. If we try to relate to the past, it's huge. It gets back to the whole question of psychology and dharma. Past and future make up our stories.

From that moment on my life became so much simpler. The same thoughts and feeling came up, but I was able to see them as being a thought in the moment, rather than shouldering the weight of my whole past life or all the anxieties about my future.