Often, it's assumed that Buddhism, or 'spirituality' in general, is some kind of alternative reality, that it's some kind of escape from the natural laws. But it's not; it's about understanding what is actually happening so that we're better orientated with reality and can then navigate ourselves effectively through reality to higher levels of happiness.

What happiness looks like - the specific external reality that brings happiness - to one person can be very different from what generates happiness in another person. This is because our taste buds are different, but internally it's the same experience, or at least very similar. Therefore, control our inner environment, and we control all that really matters.

'Buddha' translates to 'He who knows'. I.e., he who knows reality, not 'he who can do magic" or 'he who escaped reality'. Unless we're in a mental hospital (or should be), there's no such thing as finding happiness outside of reality.

We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. Ayn Rand

Buddha became The Buddha, not because he had a bunch of theories, but because he was the proof those theories were correct. Buddhism became immensely popular because his 'recipe' worked - many millions rapidly improved their level of happiness, and Buddhism grew...

Whether institutionalised Buddhism, or some branches of it, gradually moved away from, and overcomplicated, what Buddha pointed to is debated and way above my 'pay scale' to decipher. For me, the symbolism of him just sitting under a tree, totally happy, is the enduring message, because it says all that really needs to be said.

The Tao that can be explained

is not the Tao

This is a Taoist truism that points to the same thing: Everything that is actually important is an experience. It's what we feel. What the brain understands, or believes, is irrelevant, aside from whether those thoughts and beliefs are useful for generating the desired experience.

The experience/feeling that can be explained

is not the experience.

All we really 'know', is what we're feeling. That's all that actually matters. Judge a recipe by the taste it generates, not by the labels our brain generates. People tend to consume mere labels, and then wonder why they're emotionally malnourished.

Buddha understood what happiness was, and how to easily get there in reality—how to make it happen. He was the living proof that his knowledge was accurate because he had taken himself to the highest level possible - nirvana - yet he was mostly just sitting under a tree with no possessions.

Obviously, happiness is generated within, and this fact was his gift to the world long before it was generally understood. Typically, then as now, happiness tends to be understood as something we obtain by chasing and successfully matching our existing wants with our reality. We crave and chase. Craving limits the level of happiness we can experience, as craving, along with the stress that it often generates, is experienced as frustration/pain.

In reality, the primary sources of happiness - joy and love - are experiences we receive. They come to us if we have the capacity to connect on those 'frequencies', but our capacity is very limited if we're desperately running around the environment chasing. Ironically, we can run away from happiness.

Imagine a cup filled with various liquids, and those liquids each have their own flavour. Some of those flavours are pleasant flavours - they taste good - and some are unpleasant flavours - they taste bad.

We each have such a 'cup' within us, and we're experiencing/tasting the cocktail that currently fills our cup. The people who feel happy are tasting a much more pleasant cocktail than the unhappy are experiencing. Obviously, to improve our level of happiness, we need to add more of the flavours we enjoy and take out as many of the distasteful flavours as we can.

But, as our cup is limited, in practice we need to empty out the negative to have the space - to have the capacity - to receive the positive. As the flavours are all mixed up - it's typically one tangled mess - we actually have to empty out almost everything that isn't innate and then refill wisely.

In other words; We need to detox psychologically.

A 10 day meditation course involves just sitting and meditating, or at least trying to meditate, for most of the day. Meditating, in this context, means just focusing on what’s happening within us, we’re trying to be aware of the different feelings that arise within.

At the core of VP is what can be considered a psychological detox. When we’re just sitting for most of the day, for 10 days on end, we’re not able to act habitually - do what we're normally motivated to do. This weakens the strength of our habits and often completely weeds them out, leaving us free of their influence and giving us the opportunity to plant the seeds of new, more positive, and useful habits. Not only this, but because we're returning to our core motivations, our orientation as regards what we actually want from life can shift dramatically.

For the duration of the course, we do not use our phones, don’t go online, and don’t speak to anyone. When I did my course in Hyderabad, India, about 30 years ago, mobile phones and the internet didn't exist, and I found doing 'nothing' very hard. Today, with many of us addicted to our phones, completing the course is even harder as we're so used to constant stimulation.

So a VM course is not fun, but it’s a very effective way of breaking us free from many of our habits and showing us that some of our likes and dislikes, which we thought were ‘us’, actually aren't. It shows us that many of our motivations come from mere habits and/or beliefs that have been installed by others, or that we've just randomly accumulated over the years.

VM visualises habits as essentially infections; there are little invisible ‘demons’ that enter our bodies to use our energy for their purposes. Similar to how a cuckoo bird will lay its egg in another species nest, resulting in that bird incubating and raising a cuckoo instead of her own young. Cuckoo eggs hatch quicker than the other eggs, and then the young cuckoo chick throws out the original eggs, and "mum's" energy goes to what she thinks is hers, but actually isn't. So it is with our habits, be they large and obvious or smaller, more subtle, camouflaged habits that we don’t recognize as habits but consider an innate part of us.

Habits also encompass our beliefs about ourselves and the world we exist within. From our existing basket of beliefs flows some of the 'shopping list' of our current wants and needs - our motivations.

If we have a long list of 'needs' that we must successfully tick off before we be happy, then we've made happiness hard. If we think we need b,d,g,k,m,s,v,z then that's a lot, and so we need to spend much of our precious time working, perhaps experience stress (unpleasant), and have little time and energy to look after our health and enjoy life. Also, the longer our list is, the more likely some of our wants are actually contradictory, and therefore it's impossible to realise a high level of happiness.

For example, if we want to be fit and healthy but also want to eat unhealthy foods, then one motivation is contradicting and pushing against another. We have to decide which want is more important for us long-term and then be able to throw away the negative, instant-gratification habit. But, if we don't understand, or we can't handle the little bit of temporary pain weeding involves, then we can't evolve.

The rat traps are filled with soul crusaders.

Springsteen 'Night'.

Conversely, if we can prune our needs back to, say, b, g, and m, the hard is now easy. We're no longer running in confused circles, chasing this and that. Also, our pruned-back motivations are much easier to align - all be pulling us in the same direction. We stop battling against ourselves.

In practice, we don’t actually need to sit for hours and meditate to rid ourselves of habits/ infections. All that really matters is that we’re no longer obeying our habits- that we stop feeding them so they weaken and starve from the sudden lack of energy. But the beauty of the meditation part of VM is that we come to understand, because we can feel it, how habits manipulate us via pleasure and pain. Feed a habit, and it’ll push our pleasure "button"—we feel good. But ignore it, and it’ll push our pain ‘button’ and so we act as programmed to escape that pain. Ignore the habit for some days, and it’ll start desperately jabbing our pain button as it’s now starting to wither and die. This is the "monkey on our back," which is also how it’s visualised within VM.

While feeling the ongoing battles within is useful, we don't actually need to sit for ten days to achieve the bulk of the benefits VM offers; we can just do other, different activities, as that generates the same end result but is a much more pleasant experience.

So while there are other ways of psychologically detoxing, the added advantage of a VM program is that it helps us to control our thoughts.

I've drawn up this little diagram to help illustrate this, but maybe I'm made the font a bit too small. The line above ( orange ) is 'pleasant thought' and the below is 'painful/negative thoughts'

The diagram shows how our thoughts randomly bounce around. Some people tend to have more positive, cheerful thoughts, while others tend to dwell more on the negative - they think about what's gone wrong and/or what could go wrong. Why one person has more positive thoughts, while another the more negative type can likely, to an extent anyway, be traced back to childhood influences. If our parents tend to be positive and cheerful, we'll naturally tend to have that outlook as well.

While shit happens to everyone, so we all have to think painful thoughts sometimes, we make it very hard to be happy if our thoughts are not positive and enthusiastic. This is because thinking typically generates 'movies' in our brains, even if we're not consciously aware of the movie our imagination is producing. If we're thinking of some painful past event, we're recreating that event in our brain, and so we're also experiencing it again in a diluted manner. If we're thinking about what could go wrong in our future, we're consuming those 'events', and therefore generating fearfulness and anxiety. Obviously, all this self inflicted pain is pointless and negative, as the past is the past and the future we will actually experience depends upon where we take ourselves.

Happiness is something we feel. If we're making ourselves feel bad, then we have a big problem, and we need to stop our thoughts from wandering into painful territory. VM teaches us to do this by getting us to limit the range of our thoughts. By getting us to focus on what we're feeling, we also start to understand the connection between our thoughts and our feelings.

Instead of our thoughts wandering blindly, and taking us down 'dark alleys', we start to ask ourselves, ' what do I want to feel?' and then generate the thoughts, or lack of thoughts, that achieves this objective. If we can gain some control over our thoughts, we start to view them as tools that we select depending on the situation and our objectives. Ultimately, it's rarely an event that floods us with painful emotions, it's our response to that event. This truism is illustrated by the Taoist 'Farmer' story.

Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years.

One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy for what they called his “misfortune.”

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

This extreme example is used to make the concept easier to see. We're not robots, and nor do we want to be robots, we want to be able to feel our successes, and also need to be able to feel our failures. In reality, the framer would be somewhat disappointed his horse ran away, and somewhat elated his horse came back with 3 friends, etc. But the point is, he returns to his content, inner equilibrium quickly because he's in control of his inner world.

He's happy almost regardless of what happens or doesn't happen. As he independently has a high level of happiness, what does it really matter if he has 1 horse, 4 horses, or no horse? His future actions would be a bit different with 4 horses or none, but so what? Ultimately, he knows he was born, will exist and experience this life thing for a time, and then will die. It doesn't really matter what he does or doesn't do in his little flicker of time, as the universe will continue doing its universe thing regardless. Therefore, he doesn't take himself, and his little world, too seriously. He's flexible and positive, his attitude is; 'if this happens, I'll manage fine, and if that happens, I'll manage fine, and I'll die one day anyway, so why worry'?

The farmer doesn't have an overgrown basket of wants driving him on. His wants are humble and easily satisfied, so he's happy and content. Also, his thoughts don't wander much beyond the horizon, or too far into the future, so he's not bothering himself about things he cannot control, or that probably won't happen anyway.

How can that farmer ever be unhappy for long? He can't, and that's the type of reality VM tries to introduce people too.

Returning to managing our thoughts

By initially keeping our thoughts tightly controlled, and within a very limited range, for 10 days, we're breaking our habitual thought patterns along with our habitual actions. This emptying of our 'cup' creates a vacuum within which we can now introduce, and hopefully establish into habits, fresh, much more positive, and useful thought patterns.

Effectively, we're learning to understand, and then control, our operating system. It serves us instead of us serving whatever tangled mess happens to have been deposited there. Greater control over our thoughts eventually allows us to 'weaponise' them. We move from the level of gaining enough control to eradicate most of the negative elements, to being able to introduce the relevant and productive thoughts needed to best navigate the situation we're currently in. Again, we come to understand the power of our thoughts and view them as tools. We select the best ones for the situation.

To be able to reach this level, we require a 'meta' view of ourselves. We must acquire the ability to see ourselves from above, as we must have this bird's-eye view of ourselves within a particular situation/environment and have clear objectives in mind to be able to select from our toolbox of thoughts. Without this orientation, without being able to also see the big picture 'ok, I'm in this place, why am I here? What are my objectives in the short term, medium term, and long term, and what are my priorities at the moment, we cannot select our thoughts as we are inside our thoughts. We all do this anyway - we're always juggling various objectives/motivations and trying to find the optimum path to satisfy as many of them as possible.

Ultimately, though our ego resists accepting it, we're pleasure - pain machines, and what we're actually juggling are sources of pleasure and the avoidance of pain as that translates within us at that particular point in time. We eat, go to the bathroom, etc, triggered by the pain of not doing so, and by the pleasure of doing so. All motivations trace back to simple gravitation towards pleasure and avoidance of pain. This is screamingly obvious, but, somewhat ironically, as it doesn't feel pleasant to view ourselves in such a way - status/ego is important to social primates such as ourselves - we often prefer not to, and so, collectively and individually, assign ourselves much more glorious sources of motivation.

This does not mean we can't willingly take on pain, of course we can, but we only do so if we calculate it's worth it. If we believe experiencing 2 units of pain now will deliver 10 units of future pleasure, then we'll typically take that deal. Many work hard during their prime to have a pleasant retirement and/or do the 'right' actions to enter a pleasure-filled heaven and avoid the painful hell... it's all towards pleasure and away from pain as that translates within us. By understanding and accepting this obvious reality, we can greatly simplify things and make the hard easy, as opposed to making the easy hard. But, as I mention many times, accepting the subjective nature of our 'reality' and thus the subjectiveness of our current sets of values is often too painful for many, given we're so reliant on the pleasure we readily obtain from a sense of status. Status requires a hierarchy formed by an 'objective' set of values, and so we're highly motivated to pretend our subjective values are actually the right and good values. It's irrational, but many of us walk around judging other adults by our set of values, leading to most of the others failing the test and thus being below us. This means, conveniently, that we're 'superior' - we have status in our minds - and that feels good. Yet, unless we're some kind of omnipotent God, why should other adults subscribe to our particular set of values? Are we inclined to subscribe to theirs?

Anyway, returning to 'thoughts'

The point here is; ideally, step by step, by gaining ever more control over our thoughts, along with more clarity regarding what exactly it is we're seeking, we gain the ability to insert the right thoughts at the right time instead of automatically going deeper into the 'rabbit hole' we've randomly entered. Sometimes we're in an awkward situation and our ego flares up - completely normal response -but it's often not to our advantage to just blindly escalate the situation. We can go ' ok, my ego is hurt, and that is painful, so therefore I'm tempted to lash out/ get revenge, but what does it really matter? That person is as they are and they're under no obligation to act according to how I want them to act; therefore defining it as 'right' and 'wrong' is just childish. So best I just shrug and walk away'. Shit happens, but we've now got the ability to minimize any damage - we're not diving into piles of shit defending our make-believe ego. We might engage, we might escalate - sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do - but it's a more rational, calculated decision, and so we're likely to employ a potent strategy. In such a situation, we would want to tap into our ego hurt, as that motivation/energy is useful for the task at hand.

We're not robots, and this life thing is not math. It's not about navigating perfectly, and that's impossible anyway given the species we are and how we're 'wired' up. It's about understanding what is ultimately important - what we're feeling - and not easily allowing the environment, and the random events that it produces, to dictate what we feel. We accept that shit happens sometimes - we feel the pain - but minimize it by both understanding it's source and then having the ability to intervene if our instinctual reaction isn't in our best interests. We intervene by consciously choosing the thoughts that put us in a state of mind that allows us to competently solve the problem and quickly regain our emotional equilibrium. Again, we all attempt to do this, the point is that some people are very bad at this because they don't understand themselves or others. They become constantly entangled in negative - often ego-driven - situations, which limits the quality of their lives.

VM, and specifically gaining some control over our thoughts, opens up the possibility of changing negative, habitual thought patterns. It's something we learn, it's a skill like anything else. Many have already inherited this skill to a good enough level, so they don't really need this aspect of the VM program. Given that very happy people are unlikely to be motivated to sit for 10 days, a VM program naturally attracts those that need some help untangling their operating system, and, again, VM is an excellent choice for achieving this.

Ultimately, it all comes back to this:

The 'cocktail' of flavours in our 'cup' can become polluted over time, just as weeds grow in an untended garden. If we want to raise our level of happiness, if we want to improve the taste we're experiencing, we need to increase the pleasant flavours and decrease the volume of unpleasant flavours inside our cup. In practice, and because joy will flow into the space generated, we need to overturn our cup, let the tangled mess out, and then experience the difference. From there, we can add the extra flavours the world offers that we want - form new habits - but now we'll also be conscious to leave enough space for joy to flow into.

In this way, less is much more.

It's worth noting that just because we detox and have this fresh experience and perspective, it doesn't mean we have to significantly change our lives immediately, or ever. Often, the value is in the fresh perspective and knowing there's this other reality we can return to when, or if, we ever want to. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Some people enjoy one set of flavours for a time, and then they detox, switch over, and enjoy a very different cocktail for a time. They become 'chameleons', they can change to fit the environment they find themselves in or have decided to take themselves into for a time. Eventually, they select the best match on a permanent, or semi-permanent, basis. They select and enjoy from a wide range of flavours, but when that cocktail has gone stale, they can empty it out and make another.

But to do this, or even to make significant changes in our recipe/programming, we need flexibility, but our ego resists. Even if we're less than happy, we still tend to high-five our reflection and so gain some pleasure from our sense of superiority - from the status our minds believe we have accumulated. We're emotionally dependent on the particular hierarchy of values we currently subscribe to, which conveniently, has us perched high up. For social primates such as us, this strong inherent motivation for status can become a ball and chain if we need to make significant changes to our current recipe. Our recipe is shaped , in part, by our values, and we have to believe our values are, magically, the right ones to form the solid hierarchy we first need in place to perch on top of. Accepting the obvious - that it's all subjective and what is 'right' depends on who you ask - melts our hierarchy and deprives us of the delicious status flavour.

Which is why, for our species anyway, it's hard to make significant changes in a piecemeal manner, and why just emptying out our cup now and again is the only practical way for most of us, as it sidesteps our ego. Typically, as we feel so good post detox, we're no longer so dependent on status, plus our ego reforms anyway, but now around a more positive and useful hierarchy that we select for ourselves.

Again, if the recipe, including hierarchy, we've inherited and our schools have programmed us with works just fine, then all is good. We've been lucky, and so we enjoy our reality and don't overcomplicate things. Don't make the easy hard. But, if the cocktail we're tasting isn't so pleasant, we need to change it. We need to make the hard easy. A Vipassana meditation course, or our very own 'Hybrid Detox' facilitates this.