Moby Dick

The whale wins.

 

#reread  

Pointing Out the Great Way

While the subtitle of Dan Brown's massive tome is: "The stages of meditation in the mahamudra tradition", it doesn't really read as yet another meditation map book.  In part, this is because it focuses less on what results the meditator should expect at each stage, than on what the meditation instructions are for that stage.  Of course, you could use it to check off a list of meditative accomplishments and find a rank for your practice in the same way that The Mind Illuminated lends itself to.  But it seems more useful as a guide for how to order a series of techniques so that they point you gradually towards deeper levels of emptiness.  

This view of it is reinforced if you consider how tremendously repetitive the book is.  Crudely summarized, the whole path is just one long series of alternations between stabilizing and letting go.  To give it slightly more detail, we could notice that the major chapters correspond to the "main sequence" Michael Taft teaches in his Vasy Sky Mind class (and which form the backbone of his guided meditations).  

1. Shamata with an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration with Support"
2. Shamata without an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration without Support"
3. Vipashyana -- "Special Insight"
4. Dropping the Ball -- "Extraordinary Practice"

Because Brown aims to develop a very traditional account, he gives us way more substages for each of these practices, and includes several (kinda uninteresting) chapters on the preliminaries to formal mediation (like guru yoga), but the basic trajectory is recognizably the same.  While I learned all sorts of things from it, I can't say there's anyone I would really recommend the book to.  The language and presentation are just so specialized that I don't think I would have gotten much out of it if I hadn't already been exposed to these ideas in a more modern and informal way.  Which perhaps means that the book is most useful as a sort of reference manual for people already deeply familiar with the Mahamudra tradition.