VIPASSANA MEDITATION AND THE TRIAL LAWYER
By
Atty. Manuel J. Laserna Jr.
Managing Partner
Laserna Cueva-Mercader Law Offices
lcmlaw@gmail.com
http://attylaserna.blogspot.com
October 22, 2009
In the ancient 2,500-year old lingua franca of Siddattha Gautama, The Buddha, which was Pali, the term “vipassana” meant “insight”.
Vipassana meditation seeks insight, wisdom, and enlightenment which lead to the ultimate liberation of sentient beings from the endless cycle of rebirths.
Rebirth connotes the existence and operation of and the interaction between “mind and matter”.
When not disciplined, mastered and controlled and when ruled and overwhelmed by craving (greed), aversion (hatred), and ignorance (delusion), the raw psycho-physiological relationship and interaction between mind and matter always lead to suffering or misery.
When one regularly, seriously and diligently practices vipassana meditation daily, he gradually realizes the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path that leads to the cessation of suffering (nibbana in Pali or nirvana in Sanskrit).
The Buddha called them The Four Noble Truths. He selflessly spent 45 solid years of his humble, detached, and enlightened life until his peaceful death at the age of 80 painstakingly educating the poor, ignorant, hopeless and poverty-stricken masses and the arrogant, wealthy and extravagant aristocrats, rulers, and merchants of Northern India about those truths.
He did not establish a religion. What he established were a way of life and a philosophy of education that aimed to seek Wisdom and Enlightenment in order to realize the Ultimate Truth and the Universal Law of Nature (dhamma).
The path that leads to the cessation of suffering is made up of three general groups: morality (sila), concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (panna). In all, there are eight factors in the path. Under morality are right speech, right action, and right livelihood. Under concentration are right effort, right meditation, and right concentration. And under wisdom are right understanding and right thought.
Vipassana meditation entails right effort, right awareness, and right concentration -- all intended to purify the mind.
The ultimate goal is to realize and attain wisdom and enlightenment that lead to liberation from suffering and which are manifested by one’s right understanding about and the acceptance and surrender to The Truth, Nature, and The Universal Law.
The prerequisite of concentration and wisdom is morality. An impure mind is an agitated mind. It cannot attain wisdom.
All of the abovecited concepts and words are empty and meaningless unless one imbibes in his life the serious commitment to practice vipassana meditation daily for one hour each in the morning and in the evening and to regularly refresh his mind by attending a yearly 10-day residential course in a vipassana meditation center under the guidance of a trained and wise teacher.
Since 2006 I have been regularly attending at least once a year the 10-day residential meditation courses (retreats) under the pro bono auspices, sponsorship and management of the Philippine Vipassana Mediation Society (PVMS).
The society usually holds the courses in the months of April (Holy Week) and October (semestral break) of each year at the Sico Farm (a beautiful mango plantation) not far from the church and municipal hall of the fast-urbanizing town of Dasmarinas, Cavite, Philippines.
For this year, I ended my annual 10-day mediation course last week.
The PVMS industriously works under the global guidance of the International Vipassana Academy (IVA) whose world pagoda is located in the suburbs of Mumbai, India. The global vipassana Teacher is the wise, respected, articulate and warmhearted S. N. Goenka, an Indian industrialist born in Burma who, after tasting the sweetness of The Truth or Dhamma, bought back to India in the mid-1960s the pristine purity of vipassana meditation as taught by The Buddha to his monks 2,500 years ago.
The assistant teacher that Goenka has officially assigned to the Philippines is Klaus Helwig, who is a German national based in Tokyo, Japan. He selflessly supervises each and every course in the Philippines, competently aided by the untiring administrative efforts of nameless volunteer servers from the PVMS.
Shameful as it may sound, I have long ago faced and accepted the grim and disheartening fact that as a trial lawyer handling judicial and quasi-judicial cases and other forms of controversies of clients involved and immersed in painful, tedious, costly, complex and much-delayed legal battles and contests to assert what they conceive to be their lawful and valid rights, interests, assets, funds, honor, dignity, and other monetary and non-monetary claims and prayers, I earn my livelihood from the mental, physical, financial and psychological sufferings of litigants, even as in the process I absorb their miserable mental vibrations and other harmful negativities by and through some sort of karmic osmosis and psychic infection.
My only consolation, though, is that in my paid and pro bono cases, as a trial lawyer, I do not lose track of my professional goals, guided by my code of ethics, which are to assert justice, promote the rule of law, defend the sanctity of the justice system, and cleanse society of the corrupt, the dishonest, the abusive, the deceitful, and the violent.
Without self-consciously rationalizing things, I would like to think that in my own humble way I help dispense justice one case at a time, one trial at a time, one settlement at a time, one negotiation at a time, one legal pleading at a time, and one legal theory at a time.
When one seriously and regularly meditates and obediently observes the precepts of sila (morality), samadhi (concentration), and panna (wisdom), a time comes when he experiences a subtle flow of vibrations throughout his body from head to feet as he joyfully dwells in the very depth of his ecstatic and liberating meditation.
He acquires a very strong sense of unity and integration with Nature (Dhamma), The Truth, and The Universal Law at the undiscovered sub-atomic and ultimate level of reality and existence. An experience beyond mind and matter.
Indeed, the meditator is one with all, for everything and everyone are interconnected. Truly, one is all.
He is at Peace. He radiates Peace. He is Peace.
He is Justice. He radiates Fairness. He manifests the Truth.
He attains a heart and mind of peace whose first virtue, whose first impulse, and whose first spiritual and psychic longing is Compassion.
Yes, mercy, love, kindness, and selfless service.
He loses the so-called self, the so-called ego. He is, and yet he is not. He does, and yet he does not. He thinks, and yet he thinks not. He lives, and yet he lives not. He exists, and yet he exists not. He sees that there is supra-mundane beauty and nibbanic joy in the paradoxical nothingness of Ultimate Reality.
As he practices awareness and equanimity of mind in his daily life and in his daily meditations, step by step he humbly and silently works and takes the path toward the realization of the Ultimate Reality. Little by little he realizes that he is subsumed in and engulfed by the special energy of Enlightenment which liberates him from the cycle of rebirths and endless sufferings as a sentient being.
(Note: For more details, visit http://www.dhamma.org. Go to the Philippine link to contact the PVMS).
