Are you soft enough…

…for Buddha’s boot camp?

“Ten days of silence, endless hours of sitting, and no meals after midday. Intensive meditation is like psychedelic drugs; it breaks you before it makes you.”

How I learned to stop worrying and love pain

By Daniel Simpson

Some say acid offers instant enlightenment. It didn’t do it for me.

Oh, I don’t mean we didn’t have fun. The visuals from my teenage MAD trips were as mildly amusing as the leering little faces on the blotters. And it never got much hairier than fighting over the special effects specs that came with Cyberdelia, making its graphics nine times more thrilling to gawp at. But Test Tubes were made of stronger stuff. I’d blithely munched a second before the sky started scowling. Then a stereo bled my brain into the ultraworld. Hello Lostandfoundland! I cowered in my bedroom for days, begging someone, anyone, to make it go away. Even when it did, I didn’t. And wherever I turned, I tasted fear. Something had infected my mind, I could feel it. But the poison was spiked with my own.

Two years later, still panicking and searching for answers, I bought a book called Experience Beyond Thinking. It was subtitled “A Practical Guide To Buddhist Meditation”, so I filed it away on my self-help shelf. Instead, I got absorbed by A Season In Heaven, with its “True Tales From The Road To Kathmandu”, gleaned from freaks, seekers and Sixties drifters. In one scene, a white-haired ascetic called Ganesh Baba dismisses lysergic acid diethylamide as a futile attack on the fabric of consciousness. He’d never taken any, but he seemed to understand the drug completely, according to Jasper, an Oxford dropout who asked the stocky sage to be his guru. “Western knowledge could never satisfy the cosmic curiosity of the LSD initiate,” Jasper recalls being told. “That, he declared, required Indian teaching.”

Who was I to argue? Before long, I was sitting in the Kullu Valley, home to Himalayan gods and the finest cannabis on earth. Mendicants call it a sacrament; it was certainly heavenly manna. Sitting, smoking, coming, going, sitting, smoking… As time slowly vaporised, I took a trip to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s capital-in-exile and a Mecca for spiritual tourists. I had no idea what I’d find among cadres of earnest Western Buddhists, but the sight of Tibetan monks playing Playstation suggested it was the right place to go looking for guidance.

Perched above town on a hilltop, I stumbled across the Himachal Vipassana Centre, which I’d heard offered courses in meditation. Backpacker rumour had it that they were gruelling, and involved confronting your demons. Fortunately, they were booked out for weeks. So, relieved to be spared the burden of finding myself in a hermitage, I lined my rucksack with blinding hash and set out to get lost in the mountains.

Fast forward a decade and the time seemed right to try again. I’d been drifting for years since resigning from the New York Times, ostensibly in disgust at their promotion of the Iraq war. In truth, though, I’d quit because I was bored, and no longer getting ahead. By 2003, no one much cared about the Balkans, where I was stationed as a correspondent. The praise that flowed freely in my early career had dried up and my employers wanted whimsical apologetics for Western policies. To justify my own hype, I’d need to ingratiate myself with an editorial hierarchy of blowhards and true believers. It was far more tempting to smoke weed all day. So I stopped filing stories, teamed up with some Belgrade music promoters and reinvented myself as a hustler.

Our debut gig was a washout, literally. The Echo Festival, I’d promised, would equal Ibiza plus Glastonbury. Downpours duly cancelled the big day. But having spent a fortune of someone else’s money on the bands, we had to recoup it somehow. So we rescheduled for the following evening, let 80,000 people in for free and watched the bar takings vanish, despite hiring 500 well-armed stormtroopers to “guard” them. Perhaps it was tempting fate to stage the event on Big War Island, in the middle of the Danube. We couldn’t afford to pay the Yugoslav army for the pontoon bridge we’d borrowed and our debts to assorted strongmen ran to hundreds of thousands of euros. I swiftly fled the country. Although punters raved about our party, I could only see another failed effort to be somebody. I wanted to be the greatest, to write books and change the world. Instead I was on the dole in Bristol, smoking myself silly on homegrown skunk.

Now, having moved to London and found work, I’ve been getting my head back together. Enter Vipassana, the Buddha’s route to Nirvana. Allegedly. An ancient meditation technique, preserved for centuries in Burma, and today being taught round the world, from Nepal to the Welsh borders. The course is residential and intensive, with a strict code of conduct and the goal of “total liberation” from suffering. “It’ll change your life,” promises a friend. A bold claim: only my addictions have proved equal to that. I’ve slowly been reining them in though. I’ve turned 30, stopped smoking and taken up yoga. I’ve even started reading my collection of personal development books. But they can feel like a chicken soup massage: the warmth soon wears off and it’s all rather cloying. So I figure it’s time to get real, and book up for a 10-day retreat.