[MD] meditation mastery in months/not years

[Howze, John@EDD]

I like the recounting of his experience on a mountaintop in Colorado
when Allen Ginsberg wrote about a fly buzzing his head as a
major impediment to enlightenment.

My  understanding of what monkey mind does to meditation 
 a difficult nut to crack, but know nothing about a solution
That I could actually benefit from two or three months of extreme meditation?
 Ingram's article is very attractive.

Here is a  prelude to Ginsberg's vision of suffering, which could have affected his search.

In the winter of 1941, when Allen was a junior in high school, his mother insisted that he take her to a therapist at a Lakewood,
New Jersey, rest home, a disruptive bus journey he described in his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish." Naomi Ginsberg spent most of the next fifteen years in mental hospitals, enduring the effects of electroshock treatments and a lobotomy before
her death at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956. Witnessing his mother's mental illness had a traumatic effect on Ginsberg, who wrote poetry about her unstable condition for the rest of his life. 

I think the recent events in Connecticut gives particular correspondence with much of the public view of mental illness.
But, can think of none other who could write about it as A.G. did.
Can anyone else discuss the matter completely free of some bias.  However much they try?  
But, I  hope Kaddish  had a point of redemption for humanity anyway.

Thank you for the article about Ingram, 
Who woulda' thunk it, in Alabama....it is well written and leads one to have hope that monkey mind can be defeated.

I hope Persig's search led to similar solutions for his son, where the authors' own suffering seems to find meaning.
I want to say I understand it, having a son myself, but only know it is one thing to own our suffering, and to own another's
suffering is different still