Aphorism #5: Reductionist Meditation

Reductionism is rife in Vipassana meditation.

Those who have sat through ten-day retreats will know the basic argument: pain and negative emotions are illusions. Focus your mind and observe and what you’ll notice is beneath the surface there is nothing but (ever-changing) sensation.

This observation is true as far as it goes. A sardon might call it trivial were it not for the revelatory and liberatory nature of the practice. But it’s also a lie.

Technically, you can reduce love or ressentiment to mere sensation. After all, what is going on in the body but sensation? But you can also reduce a living human to a pile of inert atoms. Theoretically one could make a pile that atom for atom matches the composition of your body. The Vipassanan could tell you that these are the same thing. And they’d be right. But also: they’d be wrong.

The missing piece is emergence. What separates a pile of amino acids from a primordial organism? Life — the mysterious attractor which drew the primordial soup towards self-replication and beyond. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The thing about emergence is that it relies on its components. It’s delicate that way. Purge all the hydrogen from my body and I will die. I am reliant on the elemental components but I am not reducible to them. An emotional complex can be reduced to sensation but it is more than mere sensation.

Vipassana and other body scan meditations are powerful because they attack the components. You can spend years in therapy working on the complex at the emergent level. You deal with its causes, triggers, thought patterns, impulses and behaviours.

Or, you can cut it off at the knees. You attack it at the level of sensation. You suck the hydrogen out of its body. Without the fuel of its sensatory energy body, the whole collapses.

It’s a powerful reduction but it is still, ultimately, reductionism.