The Art of Living

From "The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka"

Every human being is conditioned to assume that the real wod is outside, that the way to live life is by contact with an external reality, by seeking input, physical and mental, from without. Most of us have never considered severing outward contacts in order to see what happens inside. The idea of doing so probably sounds like choosing to spend hours staring at the test pattern on a television screen. We would rather explore the far side of the moon or the bottom of the ocean than the hidden depths within ourselves.

But in fact the universe exists fir each of us only when we experience it with body and mind. It is never elsewhere, it is always here and now. By exploring the here-and-now of ourselves we can explore the world. Unless we investigate the world within, we can never know reality- we will only know our beliefs about it, or our intellectual conceptions of it. By observing ourselves however, we can come to know reality directly and can learn to deal with it in a positive, creative way.