Phil Aranow
1947-2000
Phil
Aranow, one of the founders and president of the Cambridge-based Institute for
Meditation and Psychotherapy, has been a close associate of the Barre Center
for Buddhist Studies for several years. In addition to teaching regularly in
the Buddhist Psychology program, Phil has been a long-time meditator at the
Insight Meditation Society, and has contributed in many intangible ways to the
growth of the dharma in New England, and in particular to the creative integration
of vipassana meditation practice and the healing arts of psychotherapy and psychological
education.
On February 18, 2000, after participating in a conference in Florida, Phil
was killed when a fifteen-year-old unlicenced driver strayed accross the median
and struck his car head-on. His wife was badly injured but is recovering, and,
thankfully, his two children (aged three and five) who were in the back seat,
survived without physical injury. The other driver received minor injuries.
Many in the local community of meditators and practicing psychologists are
mourning this tragic loss of one of our brightest lights. The remarks below
are excerpted from the last teaching offered by Phil at the Barre Center for
Buddhist Studies, on December 9, 1999, as part of the five-day residential program
on Buddhist Psychology.
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There is a Leonard Cohen song I remember, with a verse that goes something like
this:
Even though it all goes wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song,
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!
This phrase evokes for me the image of a deep level of confidence in the nature
of things, a confidence that I have experienced and have cultivated through
my practice of dharma. In the jargon of analytic theory it is called “object
constancy.” Erickson would call it “basic trust;” Winnicott
would call it “the presence of the mother;” and Paul Tillich refers
to it as “faith.”
It boils down to a basic trust that, even if you might happen to feel miserable
at the time, the world is fine; the world, in fact, is great. If ever you can
experience this basic confidence or trust, then you know you are not totally
cut off from it all—you are still, in some important way, connected.
This actually represents a great deal of progress along the path. We are all
saner, nicer and feel better as well when we are in touch with that—the
basic confidence that even if we are feeling all mucked-up and lost, yet somehow
underneath these surface perceptions it is all fine and we are still connected.
Most of the time we are screening ourselves from our direct experience of
the world. That is what delusion is all about—our various mediation and
coping strategies for screening out what we find uncomfortable to deal with.
More often than not, it is our thoughts we are eating, not our food.
Then from time to time, during meditation but also outside a meditative context,
that active process may stop for a moment. And what is our experience when it
stops? There is a sense of contact, a sense of intimacy, a sense of appreciation—in
short, there is a response. For example: I am talking here, and you are sitting
there—and for just a tiny second, I notice there is a little reflection
of the window behind me in my tea cup here.
It is just a little moment, a little “pop.” Some people call it
a “vipassana moment.” It’s not like the “BOOM”
of a wonderful, revolutionary insight (though it can be at times). And it’s
not the “BABOOOOOM” of what we think full scale liberation ought
to be. There is just this modest moment of “aaah” that takes a second—or
even a tenth of a second. But when you experience this moment you somehow feel
better, you understand a little more deeply, you feel somehow more connected
to it all.
One might argue that this is a lot of what meditation is all about. It involves
a training to notice when this happens spontaneously. You learn to pick up on
what is happening a little bit more. And you might even then react to it, because
it is nice, and try to extend it. Maybe I’ll look at the cup again…
Isn’t this the pay-off of meditation practice, if you are not a monk
or a nun? Isn’t the pay-off that you have more of these little moments—these
moments of seeing things differently, of feeling things more intimately, of
connecting more directly to the experiences that are not centered around ourselves
and our desires and our attachments?
This is actually all you need to start making life better already. Some teachers
even say that these tiny, instantaneous moments of awakening are the same as
the full-scale, big thing. It is just our deluded, attached mind that makes
us want it more, bigger, better.
But you’ve already got it, actually. (Snaps fingers). It’s right
here, right now.