A ‘Clear Seeing’ of dukkha of a student at a rave party
Clear seeing ( vipassana Dukkha (suffering)
A striking example of Vipashyana was provided by a student of mine in her early twenties who had been meditating for some time. Since her late teens, she had been a devotee of “raves” dance parties held at enormous warehouses in our area, attended by literally thousands of young people. Well known bands are engaged, the music is loud, alcohol and drugs are sometimes consumed, and dancing goes onto until dawn. The atmosphere is usually “mellow” and fun, and young folks are drawn back to the parties again and again. My student was attending a rave one Saturday night and . . . for no apparent reason, wanted to feel the cool, the space, and the silence of the night.
She left the huge wharehouse, where the party was happening and walked across an adjacent field onto a hillock beyond. Turning around, she looked at the building, throbbing with music and blazing with light, packed as it was with several thousand “ravers.”
Suddenly without warning, it was as if her eyes were open for the first time and she “saw” the party . . . so she reported . . . in all its naked reality.
She saw the tremendous desperation of the people inside, their loneliness and their hunger, how they had all become predators, preying upon one another, in a fruitless search for happiness. It was an endless game in which she too, was involved.
Overcome by sorrow and hoplessness of the situation, she broke down and wept. She came to talk to me because as she said, this experience had shown her something not only about “raves’ but life in general, about the many things people do out of their own suffering. She saw her experience as a direct result of meditation practice and her commitment to her spiritual path.
Her experience had made her realise, again for the first time, that her meditation was the one anchor in her life and that the spiritual journey she had undertaken was about having her eyes open, in perhaps shocking and painful ways, to the underpinnings of the seemingly normal everyday world.
