Are you soft enough…
January 16, 2008…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.
EXCESS ALL AREAS
Not so fast. Wary of surrendering my summer to self-improvement, I’ve decided to warm up at The Big Chill. And I’m camping with a colony of psychonauts. No sooner have the tents gone up than they’re laying out lines of coke and mining a bottomless seam of nuggets of MDMA. They’re lovely friends, really. Whatever they ingest barely alters them, bar a bit of blinking and sweating, so I generally can’t resist joining in. Not this time though. I insist I’m enjoying a narcotic-free festival, even if I have to drink my weight in alcohol to pull it off. I hold out until dawn on the final day, when I crack and roll a pure single-skinner. After a few hours of coma, I scrounge enough White Widow to keep me chain-smoking joints until sundown, which is precisely what I do, washing them down with lager and gyrating like a dervish. I’m last seen skulling a pitcher of Helsinki Mule, then passing out in a field called Fat Tuesdays. It’s hardly the ideal preparation for a bout of asceticism, but it’s all about balance in the end, I reason, before falling over.
I don’t do moderation, just rotating aversion and craving. I’m either an ex-smoker or I’m nursing a chronic habit, and there’s no better incentive to relapse than the self-loathing reproach of a hangover. I also just love getting high. It kindles childish glee and everything seems possible, even when the dreams don’t come true. For years, a hit seemed the substance of life, no matter what the escapism did to my angst. So what’s changed? Perhaps I see the senselessness of wanting too much. But the thought of going without still feels harsher than the truth. Even in abstinence, I’m hooked on my tortured self-image, a delusion of affluenza and its symptoms of narcissism and greed.
Everywhere you turn, it’s pandemic. People gorge and starve themselves into malnutrition. Prosperity depends on buying what we don’t need, preferably on borrowed money. Relentless growth could kill the planet, but we fret about what cutbacks do to house prices. And despite our unprecedented wealth, we’re unhappier than we’ve been in decades. More Britons have taken antidepressants than voted for Tony Blair. So warped is our post-modern detachment that Selfridges advertised its last sales with banners announcing: “Plenty ought to be enough”, and: “You want it you buy it you forget it”. The checkouts showed no signs of suffering.
In me, these afflictions gnaw at “the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach”, to plagiarise Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. Whether it’s for sex, drugs, or status, my desire seems utterly insatiable. I get knotted with self-pity, I seek solace in sensation and I’m mad I can’t get what I want, even if I never really know what that is. “You’ll get your ulcer,” an old boss once warned me. I’m terrified he doesn’t know the half of it.
So the advertised benefits of Vipassana hold a special appeal. “As a by-product of mental purification,” says a promotional pamphlet, “many psychosomatic diseases are eradicated.” Indeed, the man behind a global network of teaching centres only learned to meditate because he’d heard it might cure his migraines. But his guru refused to instruct him unless he sought respite from the root of all misery, not just tension headaches. The principles are the same for managing anger, addiction and anxiety. They also promise “positive contributions to society”, and even “full enlightenment”. So what’s the magic secret?
Doing nothing. Yes, that’s right: nothing. And, as a tripping Dutch hippie once convinced me, not doing is really so much harder than doing. Our reflexes seize on everything around us and inside, from emotions to the weather. And whenever something unwanted happens, the reactions tend to be negative. Pleasure, by contrast, is rarely just experienced. Instead, we want more and get upset when we’re deprived. Even just relaxing is tough once you’re agitated. So we attach ourselves to our stress, ratcheting it up ‘til we snap, or reach for whisky, or whatever way of coping people like to think they’ve devised.
Another world is possible, however. Vipassana offers “purification of the mind at the root level” by a process of “systematic and dispassionate observation of the ever-changing mind-matter phenomenon manifesting itself as sensation within oneself”. I’m intrigued. It sounds a whole lot more sophisticated than counting to ten, but the theory is really quite simple: diverting attention from desire and negativity merely represses them, while observing them saps their power. That’s easier said than done though. How does one observe anger? Usually in hindsight: by the time we’re conscious of it, we’ve already lashed out. This is where “The Awakened One” comes in.
The Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama to contemporaries, enlightened himself by watching how his body worked. According to legend, he sat under a tree for weeks until he’d figured it all out. But among his discoveries was something straightforward: every mental process has a physical corollary. Negative thoughts and emotions trigger biochemical reactions, from disturbed breathing to acid indigestion. These spark negative reactions in turn, quickly compounding our misery. But if we observe the sensations with detachment, the Buddha is said to have said, we see they come and go, constantly changing like our feelings, and pretty much everything else. When we experience this for ourselves, the effect is liberating: we stop reacting blindly, right here, right now, and we learn how to free ourselves from suffering.
Or so they say. I’m a congenital sceptic, with little time for organised religion and other superstitions. Physical yoga aside, Eastern teachings have only really moved me when delivered by a hash pipe and cries of “Bolenath!” Yet it’s hard to find reasons to dismiss Vipassana, which sounds more irreligious than Buddhist. “There is absolutely no question of conversion,” the pre-course briefing assures me. “All human beings share the same fundamental problems, and a technique which can eradicate these problems will have a universal application.”
Even the spiritual bits aren’t offputting. Wisdom is described as “observing reality as it is”, instead of clinging to illusions, or the depressing gulf between them and truth. Anything that helps me accept who I am can’t be bad, I figure, even if I don’t always like what I see. And “mastery of the present moment” has to beat fantasising about a future that just winds up resembling the past.
But as the course draws nearer, a voice of doubt keeps nagging. Maybe it’s all mumbo jumbo. Worse still, maybe it isn’t. How much longer am I planning to stagnate? Do I actually want to be happy? If not now, when?
THE JOURNEY INWARDS
Nestled among the green-and-brown patchwork dividing England from Wales, the UK Vipassana Centre sprawls across a disused farmyard. Think spartan in the spirit of youth hostelling, only with showers that get hot enough to scald. Most rooms have two or three beds, apart from a dormitory with curtained-off cubicles, which are reserved for return visitors. Little but the toilet block is purpose-built, and even that feels makeshift. In an outhouse round the corner, the dining hall smells of mop water. This is somehow oddly soothing.
Beyond these converted stables and shacks lie a few acres of grassland, rolling down to a copse by the fence around our isolated world. It’s all rather bucolic, what with mooing and bleating from the neighbouring fields, but there’s not a lot of scenery to behold. You can walk around the site in 10 minutes, which means we’ll be doing it a lot. It’s about the only diversion from contemplation. The nearest settlement of any size is miles away and, to my infinite amusement, it’s called Much Birch.
The centre’s name is Dhamma Dipa, or island of Dhamma, as the Buddha’s teachings are known in liturgical Pali. This word has multiple meanings, mostly approximating to the way things are, or the law of nature, or truth. But what does that really amount to? “Well, there’s lots of suffering,” quips an old student, who like me has just arrived for the course. Never having meditated, I don’t feel up to Buddhist repartee. So I head to the refectory for biscuits.
For all the grinning from behind a registration desk in the corner, most of the faces I scan seem twitchy with apprehension. Those that aren’t look lobotomised, as if wrought into dreamy composure. Suddenly I’m back in India, convincing myself that serenity’s just a mask for the smug and the underclass. But there’s very little comfort in my prejudices. The austerity we’re signing up for is too real.
For the next 10 days, I’ll be living like a monk, from the 4:00 a.m. wake-up gong until lights out at 9:30. Most of the time I’ll be sitting, and staring into space with my eyes shut. Although there are 100 of us, we might as well all be alone: everyone’s taking a vow of silence, and it starts in less than an hour. We’ve also agreed to be celibate, but with men and women segregated, and touching one another taboo, this is really just a promise not to wank.
We’re sworn, furthermore, not to lie, or to steal or to kill, though we’ll probably trample on insects, and doubtlessly mislead ourselves. Intoxicants are banned, along with books, pens and paper, and we’re not even meant to make eye contact. No hint of communication is allowed, to stop us disturbing each other’s focus. “Take no notice of distractions,” counsels a summary of the rules. “It is only by taking a disciplined approach and by making maximum effort that a student can fully grasp the practice and benefit from it.”
For now, though, everyone’s chatting and chomping. The bowls of soup on offer will be our last evening meal before we leave. As of tomorrow, there’s only breakfast and lunch, with nothing after noon except a mug of hot water with lemon. Newcomers like myself can have a piece of fruit instead, but it’s hardly the makings of dinner. I grab more biscuits and wonder whether I should have brought a stash. But then I remember the guilt pangs that stopped me hanging onto my painkillers, which like everything else are forbidden. They’re now locked away with my mobile, and most of my subversive tendencies. I’m starting to feel scared.
“So how much do you think we pay them?” someone next to me asks. The course is nominally free, but donations are encouraged if you complete it. “Tricky,” replies another. “What’s a night here worth?” I venture that it depends on what we get from the experience. “So,” the first guy concludes, “that’s more than a fiver but less than a grand?” Something like that, we agree.
Outside, people are limbering up with yoga stretches, or throwing different forms of Tai Chi. These are also verboten, someone announces, with schoolboy condescension. Like, duh! He’s not even an official enforcement Nazi. I walk away before I say something I’ll have to stew over. “It’s important to have a sense of humour,” beams another man I’ve never met, as we wait for a gong to shut us up. “Things get pretty dark unless you laugh at yourself.” He’s right too, but I don’t know that yet. It just sounds like it might make sense. “How can we lighten up if we make everything heavy?” he continues. “The key is to try without trying.”
My instincts say argue, but there’s no time left for that. A low, vibrating ring is summoning us towards what looks from the outside like a gym hall. Anything less Buddhist would be difficult to picture; even its sparseness of form seems chance. We remove our shoes in a glass-paned antechamber and file into our home for the next 250 hours, barring bedtimes and breaks. Instead of criss-crossing tramlines, the floor is sectioned off with square blue mats, a large one each with a nametag, laid out in rows facing forwards. Against the back wall, there’s a pile of cushions and blankets, whose purpose will soon become clear.
If you haven’t sat cross-legged since your schooldays, try it for a few minutes without moving. Then imagine doing it all day. It hurts, until the numbness kicks in. People try anything to get comfortable, but to little avail. One man builds a tower of soft furnishings, which he straddles as if riding a donkey. It sinks like Balkan taxi suspension. Others squat on fishermen’s stools, tucking their legs underneath. They still stand up semi-crippled. Chairs are on offer for the truly infirm, but being a bit of a waster doesn’t seem to qualify me, at least not for the balls to ask for one. Grinning or not, there’s really no option but to bear it, which seems to be part of the point.
TOUCHING THE VOID
“Observe the breath, natural breath,” say our instructions, which we’re ordered to request by repeating ceremonial chants. “If it is deep, it is deep,” we’re advised. “If it is shallow, it is shallow.” Although two teachers, one male, one female, perch on platforms at the front, they do little more than play DJ. While they sit impassive like Raelian clones, all the words we hear come piped out of speakers, reviving an old course by the founder of their group.
Satya Narayan Goenka will be ringing in our ears for weeks. His voice alone would ensure that, even without the repetition. From the gurgling of its first ululations to his melodramas of delivery, everything about it sounds staged: pay full attention to that man behind the curtain, for he booms like the Wizard of Oz. The word Vipassana might mean nothing more than “special observation”, but to millions it’s become synonymous with Goenka.
The scion of Indian industrialists, he was raised in neighbouring Burma, where neuralgia put paid to his business career. Searching in vain for a cure, he was eventually referred to a man named Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who’d just retired as the Burmese Accountant General. Having learned to meditate as a lowly clerk, U Ba Khin taught colleagues in his office after hours, and later in a hilltop temple. It was here that Goenka came to find relief and, unwittingly at first, his vocation.
Although Buddhism stems from India, it’s long since largely died out there. Indeed, had the warrior king Ashoka not embraced its teachings, and sent missionaries to spread them across Asia, it may not have survived more than a few hundred years. Instead, it’s flourished in exile, relayed by teacher to student for more than two millennia. As in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Laos, Burmese monks have preserved a Theravadan technique that’s uncluttered by mantras or visions. Its ethos, says Goenka, is nothing more than “abstaining from unwholesome activities, performing wholesome activities, and purifying the mind.”
What U Ba Khin inherited, however, was something more than tradition distilled. He also got the urge to take it back to its roots, but he couldn’t get the necessary visa. “This country where pure Dhamma arises, what is happening there?’” Goenka remembers his teacher asking. “People are quarrelling, fighting,” came the answer. “‘My religion, your religion.’ All sectarian conflicts. Racial conflicts and conflicts on the basis of caste: high caste, low caste.” So, after 14 years with U Ba Khin, the émigré fulfilled his wish, crossing into India to preach transcendental peace. Though he’s trained others to lead his courses over the intervening decades, they still work with tapes of their master’s voice.
Suspicious as this makes me of its mesmerising tones, it’s nonetheless highly effective. Slowly but systematically, our concentration deepens. For the first three days, we focus solely on breathing, which would be as dull as it sounds were it not for a steady drip feed of guidance. To start with, our attention is fixed on the feeling of air as it enters and leaves. We’re encouraged to breathe heavily if our minds start drifting, but otherwise to let it flow naturally. So is that hard or soft? Jerky or rhythmic? Through one nostril or two? Whatever, we’re told; our job is simply to watch. On day two, it’s to notice the touch of the breath on the upper lip and thereafter to observe any sensation we find on the nose and the area beneath it.
For three hours daily, at 8:00, 2:30 and 6:00, Goenka leads group meditation. The rest of the sessions start with a few pointers and an invitation to continue in our rooms. Outside the main hall, it’s harder to focus. Even sitting upright is tricky on a duvet. I take to wedging myself against the wall, and trying not to lie down more than three times an hour. Not talking is so much easier than not getting bored. The days stretch on interminably, with two hours of unguided sitting before breakfast, another two before lunch and an afternoon of 90-minute split shifts, without so much as a meal to look forward to. It’s barely any better in the hall, even with the lingering peer pressure to which I’m meant to be oblivious. I struggle to keep my eyes closed and fidget, experimenting with endless configurations of cushions, and the benefits of sitting versus kneeling.
It quickly becomes clear that meditating in your room is a pseudonym for sleeping, at least some of the time. There’s already a 20-minute snooze function in the form of a second wake-up gong, and if you doze beyond that one, the next is the cue to start queuing for breakfast. Of those who stick doggedly to sitting in the hall, few last a full session without retreating, often to snatch a quick nap. The lack of food and sleep is exhausting enough, quite apart from the effort of staying still. Our only release, not that we actually get to recline, is a nightly audience with Goenka, or rather poorly shot videos of him talking to a group of Americans.
“You must work very patiently,” he keeps telling them, and us, via screens on the wall near the ceiling. “Patiently, persistently and continuously. Continuity of practice is the secret of success.” It’s almost a sales pitch, but that isn’t how it feels. His jocular blend of anecdotes and fables is balm for aching brains, putting our discomfort into context. “You are performing an operation on your mind,” he reminds us, reducing the technical theory to Buddhism for Dummies. “Remain in the operating room. Resolve to remain for the entire period of the course, no matter what difficulties you face.”
I’m not at all surprised to wake up on day three to the sight of a roommate packing. It’s only a week later that I find out why, after he’s been talked into staying. But it seems that being Indian might make things harder to swallow. “I couldn’t take any more of this fat Brahmin tyrant telling me to lose my ego,” he splutters. “I didn’t want to add to the numbers after his name.”
Goenka denies he’s recruiting a cult of meditation monkeys. “We are not interested in just increasing the number of people who call themselves disciples,” he says. “Dhamma does not want you to have any master except yourself.” But my neighbour has other ideas. “Our teacher’s been meditating 30 years and he’s not allowed to speak for himself? Gimme a break,” he counters. “Instead I have to listen to some rich old Hindu telling us how he’s the master. Sorry, but I’ve heard it all before.”
And there’s more: a tirade against Goenka’s family, which got rich off the British Empire and founded one of its own, named RPG; a second about its outcast trading stock; and another decrying the purification spiel as a cover for disowning these roots. Then come digs at his wealth, and the pagoda he’s building near Mumbai with donations from people like us. Finally, my dissident companion concludes, the mystical performance is a joke, hamming up hypnosis in Pali. “All this talk about the final goal is the biggest illusion of all,” he says. “There’s no getting there, of course, but you can always sign up for more courses.” Well, yes, perhaps, but surely only the delusional think enlightenment is more than work in progress. And there’s no need to take Goenka undiluted, nor to give him as much as a penny. Still, if this guy thinks he’s debunked Eastern wisdom, one wonders why he’s wasting his time.
Long before I hear any of that, I’m unsettled. I’m way too stubborn to think of leaving, but I’ve been starting to doubt why I came. My knees are sore and my mood is sour, rotting my vegetable bowels. Apart from the rituals and regular meals, am I getting any more than I’d find in a cave? And what do I think I can change? These and other questions weigh on me as I walk to the wash-block, staring as ever at my feet. Someone holds the door open, head bowed, and I realise we’ve started ostentatiously acknowledging each other’s presence. Even the attempt to shut down verbalisation seems futile. From somewhere deep in my subconscious, all the people I’ve sworn never to speak to keep popping up with one-liners, embittering me further. By the time I’ve picked a cubicle, I feel thoroughly depressed.
“You don’t deserve to be alive,” I tell myself. This sounds conclusive, but it’s really just a reflection of projected misanthropy, the payback for years of hating fuckups who dare to be happy. And now I’m sitting face to face with The Scream. Right in front of me, there’s a pair of knots in the woodwork and they’re swirling like rabid saucers. Another defect gapes beneath them, karmically coming to get me. “I’m so feeble I trip out on toilet doors,” mewls a voice of self-pity. “Well piss off then,” I retort. As if by magic, something flips. My first Vipassana poo makes a satisfying plop.
AWAKENINGS
Back in the hall, a hundred secret fantasies project onto bolted-down eyelids. There’s no outward sign of this unwinding repression, apart from the occasional sigh. It’s only later that I hear about sex acts too warped to name, as if the protagonists were tabloid sub-editors. Such puritan prurience alarms me, unlike the confessions of a guy who watches webporn for hours. My own fetid obsessions feel too tedious to indulge. I’m amazed, having expected to vanish for days up an arse full of buried angst, but why smear myself with what I can face, or let go? Tempting as it was at first to make a big deal of meditating, it’s so much better to relax.
Perched in the darkness, there’s not much out there to mould, and no point getting seriously rigid. Sure, it helps to sit up straight, but that comes naturally enough, once you drop the act. And then the discomfort blurs. Instead of constantly checking myself, or analysing every last detail, I’m starting to simply observe, and finding I’m happier than I thought. Without words or concepts filtering perception, it’s more a question of seeing without prejudice. “The slower you get, the further you go,” I chuckle in Fortune Cookie, “provided you focus on now.”
That’s never been much of a strong point, however. Having nothing on my mind has always sounded like a handicap, certainly creatively, but trying to control it is worse. The urge to become, rather than be, is paralysing, as if nothing were worth starting without a Canaletto blueprint. That writing might dictate itself always sounded too absurd for words. Yet no sooner has the contorting stopped than sentences form that I long to jot down, only I can’t, like everyone else. One man winds up memorising a story for his nephew; another student outlines a novel. Something’s flowing vividly, like the blood that’s now tingling my nostrils.
“Start again,” rumbles the resident MC, with trademark fermata. “Whatever sensation you feel, accept the reality as it is, not as you would like it to be.” Of course, I’m doing anything but. Having cheered myself up by letting go, I’m drifting off on a riptide of inspiration. Elaborate plans float by, begging to be grasped and realised. It’s difficult to stay immersed, yet somehow easier to spot this than it was when I found it a nuisance. Time and again, I return to my pulsating upper lip, which to Goenka seems to be a portal to enlightenment.
“Modern scientists have confirmed the findings of the Buddha,” he proclaims, as we feel our own vibrations. “The entire material universe is composed of subatomic particles which rapidly arise and pass away.” This is the essence of Vipassana: a crash course in cauterised thought. The Tao of Physics meets The Te of Piglet at a cosmic concentration camp. Whatever you make of Goenka’s cod-science, Eastern mysticism is palpably quantum. Everything exists in a state of flux, never being quite what it seems, so the appearance of permanence is illusory, however tempting it might be to think otherwise. “Within the physical and mental structure, there is nothing that lasts more than a moment, nothing that one can identify as an unchanging self,” Goenka says. “But mere intellectual understanding of this reality will not help; one must experience it within oneself.” Hence the fixation on sensation, or in practice the diametric opposite. “Pleasant or unpleasant makes no difference,” we’re told. “Whatever the sensation may be, it has the same characteristic, the characteristic of arising and passing away.”
By day four, it’s time to expand our consciousness of the ephemeral, assisted by incantation. “Anicca,” barks our guide, intoning the Pali for transience. “Anicca. Anicca.” No longer are we scanning just a section of the face; our focus has become the whole body. It’s not quite cell-by-cell, but we work our way through it so laboriously that the process takes almost two hours. And just to make sure that we’re throbbing, we’re told not to move as much as a limb. “Observe each and every sensation that you experience,” come the instructions, as if there were any alternative. “Don’t have preference for any particular sensation. Don’t have prejudice against any particular sensation.” This, writ large, is the crux of the teaching. “No more craving, no more aversion. You have to come out of this mad habit pattern.”
Four basic truths are coursing through my corpuscles. The first: that suffering is everywhere; the second: illusions sustain it; the third: they can be shattered by acceptance; and the fourth: that meditation helps. You might not change the world but you can certainly change your reactions, or at any rate get less caught up in them. It’s more than 30 minutes since my legs froze, but that’s not really why they’ve stopped hurting. The struggle for comfort has ceased and twinges just help me surrender. Beyond that, there’s not much to say. I’m buzzing like the Ready Brek man, with a whole in the middle of which there’s nothing but consciousness. I think. Except I don’t. Therefore I am. Or something. I’ve never felt anything like it.
Vast energies seem to be radiating from the breakdown of microscopic nuclei. To paraphrase the man who told me smoking was crazy, it’s a bit like wearing tight shoes all day for the pleasure of taking them off. Only it’s not really like that at all. Goenka, of course, has the answer, right at the height of our spasms. “This,” he declares, “is reality,” in constantly changing glory. And in the moment I have to agree. As we stumble outside for a break though, it’s clear that there’s more to digest. A hush seems to descend, on top of the silence and the lack of it. Everywhere, people are puffing and shaking, apart from the ones who’ve collapsed. From now on, all our guided sessions will be “sittings of strong determination”, which means no more moving allowed. Once was happenstance, but three times daily is premeditated pain. The very idea is mind-blowing. And yet, wasn’t that the point?
LOSING MY RELIGION
At first there’s a rush of achievement, then a comedown of crippling inadequacy. Outside the prescribed hours, few can muster the discipline to keep sitting in the same position. Not that my competitive streak notices; it’s already picked out a rival. If I open my eyes and he’s still in the room, then I summon the will not to move. Clearly, this is all about the ego I’m supposed to be transcending, but recognising it sharpens my focus. Time starts to melt, and with it resistance to patience. I find I can spend longer and longer in the zone, wherever that is. From the ringing in my temples and forehead, it seems to be inside my third eye, but I don’t know what that’s meant to mean. As another day passes, the concentration intensifies. My head starts to whirr and my neurons are wired. Suddenly, I’m having a flashback.
“You have to fight out your own battles.” Goenka’s gone on auto-repeat, looping away with my psyche. “You have to work out your own liberation.” That’s not what I wanted to hear. For years, I’ve been waiting to be rescued. Since my last bad trip, it’s been blatant that something had to change, just as long as that didn’t mean me. So I’ve only ever dealt with the symptoms of anguish, and all the while swollen its cause. Policing my thoughts, I’ve tried to weed out the panic, to convince myself I’m prepared for anything. Of course, this only made me more anxious, behind a neurotic façade. Terrified of exposure as either cretin or control freak, I’ve been obsessed with looking effortlessly clever, and masking my hatred of not measuring up. But as watcher as well as the watched, there’s nowhere to hide from my effort to outthink myself. And that’s what keeps spinning me out, especially when wrecked.
Wise to these prodigy pipe dreams, the jukebox within battles back. “Breathe the pressure,” it taunts. “Come play my game I’ll test ya. Psychosomatic addict, insane.” Ouch. “Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim.” Everything’s spiralling fractally. “Exhale, exhale, exhale.” Phew! I figure it’s time to talk. Once a day, students can discuss problems with the teachers who don’t do much teaching. Ours seems rather wooden, but that might be down to meditating for 30 years, which could also account for his Sunday school manner. This doesn’t bother me much, but after 120-something hours of silence, I’m shocked to hear I sound like a choirboy. I try to disguise my concerns as abstract questions, but however they’re phrased, the answer’s almost always the same: “Just observe,” he says, “and try to be equanimous.” As in: I’m losing the plot, never mind? Pretty much. The thought is almost as scary as the ones I want to suppress.
Still, you can’t solve a problem with the mindset that made it, so there’s really no alternative but to find one, by not looking except for what’s there. Words can’t quite convey what I’m realising, which suggests it might even be true. It feels as if a mirror’s melting; that I can say I’m full of flaws and just accept it, instead of crossing fingers in pseudo-exorcism, and craving affirmation more than ever. The same game goes on regardless, but a statue I’ve been polishing has dropped from its pedestal and smashed. Another will be cast in its image, only ever so slightly more fragile, and also doomed to shatter, no matter how I struggle to protect it. There’s really nothing for it but to open up, like stoving in the skull on magic mushrooms.
“When psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed,” preached a recording that my brother turned me onto in our teens, while we loaded up on soap bar through a bong. “Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience,” continued the voice, as waveringly oddball as Goenka’s. “With that experience the compass of the self can be set.” Thus spake Terence McKenna, a shamanic ethnobotanist, who proposed getting fried as our ultimate salvation. “Getting it all reconnected,” he explained, “means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish.” So, “the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers,” and “hooking ourselves back up into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature.”
Well, quite. Wandering in bliss round Dhamma Dipa, its leaves and buds are crystalline. Water droplets bulge like mercury and a rockery’s intricacies look infinite, backlit from somewhere within. I’m transported to a vision of Catalonia on mescaline, overwhelmed by dawn’s revival of a barren hillside. Its forms and colours shimmer, deepening and yet flirting with transparency, revealing a living structure into which it seems possible to blend. There’s nothing else for it, in fact, but to move inside and become part of the natural world.
“Acid’s like your father, but mescaline’s your mother,” an old freak had told us, doling out the grains that decluttered our vision. “Both teach the same lessons, only one’s a bit sterner.” The underlying message is that “the problem is you”. More gently expressed, it’s what a sadhu told a seeker after ultimate truth: “sab ek”; everything is one. Or, in the newsspeak of Bill Hicks: “Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”
Making sense of this intellectually can’t equate to raw experience, and experiencing it straight is a different order of mind-bending. Drugs feel like a short cut because they knock down the obstacles to reaching a place where there’s no getting there. But whatever the route, you’re still moving beyond shared reality, walking a transliminal tightrope between spirituality and psychosis. “In the body,” said McKenna, in his mushroom musings, “there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.” Meditation also explores this cascade at the core of being, sharpening awareness of it so as to derive insight from every waking moment. It’s really not about chasing tranquillity, though there’s a risk of mistaking this for the goal, instead of embracing perpetual uncertainty.
“With every unpleasant sensation, strengthen your equanimity,” Goenka urges, “understanding fully well this unpleasant sensation is not eternal.” The rest of the course is spent scanning our skin, “moving down to the tips of the toes, and from the tips of the toes to the top of the head.” Little by little, we’re asked to focus on “intensified, solidified, gross sensations”, and see how they dissolve into “uniform subtle sensations” under equanimous scrutiny. It’s all about making peace with the past, Goenka claims, with deep-rooted attachments popping up and passing away if we let them. All it takes is the detachment not to identify them as “ours”. Even my gutrot evaporates without its usual wafts of food’s ghost. Eventually, we’re told, we can “sweep en masse with a free flow” of vibrations. In other words, you start rushing all over. This happens to me first on day seven.
“Do not neglect any part of the body,” Goenka repeats, as I start coming up. “Do not ignore any sensation you observe.” Someone seems to have wired up my scrotum to a car battery and stamped on the accelerator. Waves of energy are pumping round me like a plasma ball and I’m oozing a sensation for which there’s no descriptive term except loving. A conviction grips me that everything everywhere is fundamentally OK, regardless of how it might seem, and will be even when I die, if that’s how I choose to go. It’s like finding God in my own peace of mind, however fleeting, or seeing death as life’s ultimate source.
I realise suddenly I’ve been here before, after baling out of Belgrade a few years back. Four days into a psychedelic bender, I collapsed on a couch with pounding heart and cracked the riddle of existence. Or so it seemed. Phoning a friend to share the good news, I announced I’d met the devil at the crossroads in my life and I’d sold him the keys to my soul tunes. Not that there was anything to worry about, mind. “I’m the King of the Jews,” I declared. “So now you’ll have to kill me.” He’s Jewish. Within hours he’d summoned a doctor to shoot Valium up my backside.
“Think you’re Jesus, bang a drum,” advises a specialist on navigating between everyday life and these distant worlds beyond boundaries. Essentially, she’s saying don’t get lost in dreamland. But another way of looking at it might be to take the so-called Messiah at his word: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Simply being (“I am”), at one, might be the closest there is to an answer, available to anyone always. And if we’re all our own hindrance, in the form of delusional ego, the way to transcendence might be not to seek truth, but instead just to drop our idées fixes. Having stopped running away from myself and trying to become someone, even if only temporarily, I find I don’t need to throttle life with labels, or to feel in constant conflict with “I”. After all, why get attached to what’s changing? Why not be happy, here, now?
As the sun rises, grown men are gurning in sweat pants, lost like me to their own organic Ecstasy. My synapses sizzle in serotonin while my body takes an empathy bath. It’s not remotely unpleasant, but I’m fading fast and starting to slump. The internal soundsystem starts warbling Urban Hymns. “Weeping willow,” it bleats, “the pill’s under my pillow.” Except it isn’t. It’s in my head, or somewhere else in the shape-shifting mass that isn’t quite I, me, or mine. I decide I need air, almost as much as I want sugar. I consider storming the kitchens and demanding a packet of Digestives. But I don’t know how to do it in sign language while ogling at my shoes. So I make do with a tour of the field. Again.
BLISSED OUT
On the penultimate morning, Goenka talks us into the total dissolution of mind and matter. No other words will suffice. Arrows of directed awareness shoot through the flesh from all angles. Everything, within and beyond, is vibrating so subtly that it seems to have vanished. “Human life is so precious,” roars the voice in the blackness, urging us to harness its potential. We’re defying physical restraints, if only for half an hour, having out-of-body experiences inside our material limits. I seem to have slipped into a benign kind of K-hole. My breathing sounds like Darth Vader down an inverted stethoscope and I’ve no idea where I am except here. I guess you have to be there.
Still, it’s not really somewhere I want to stay forever, goofing off on reality in a bubble. As an end in itself, that’s more like masturbation than communing with the essence of life. But it’s no more an opiate than other spiritual exercises, nor any less enlightening than reciting Koranic verses you can’t read. What counts is how you use the technique. For all Goenka’s insistence otherwise, the course focuses on steadily intensifying sensations, from itches and aches to melting spinal cords. So people tend to rate progress in terms of sensual intensity. “How’s your equanimity coming on?” the teacher asks a group of us, checking our grasp of what we’ve learned. “Frankly,” says a man to my left, “I’m bored.” I have to say I admire his honesty.
Another student gets reprimanded for giving herself orgasms until she faints, well almost. Clandestine or otherwise, euphoric highs aren’t supposed to be the point, at least not according to Goenka. “If you start hating the unpleasant sensations,” he warns, “and start craving for the pleasant ones, you are far away from your liberation, far away.” Yet he keeps dangling this “final goal” in front of us, defining it as a lack of dislike and desire, incarnate in the absence of “gross sensations”, and a corresponding preponderance of nice ones. Even though he frowns on sensory indulgence, it’s hardly surprising that people seek it in the pursuit of purification, especially if sex, drugs and booze are all proscribed.
Such ascetic competitiveness can foster spiritual materialism, trading in tangible advancements toward elevated states. “The ambition to improve ourselves is itself the problem,” cautions Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan who tailored Buddhism to Western tastes, drinking heavily until he died in the 1980s. “Insights come only when there are gaps in our struggle, only when we stop trying to rid ourselves of thought, when we cease siding with pious, good thoughts against bad, impure thoughts, only when we allow ourselves simply to see the nature of thought.”
It’s the same with lust, or any other powerful urge. Repression just heightens temptation, feeding an addictive cycle of denial and indulgence, or breeding self-righteous moralising. Both, in their different ways, are the antithesis of insight. Desire, after all, can delight. And emancipating it punctures illusions, to the extent we can detach enough to observe. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” wrote William Blake, in revolutionary exhortation, “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Who then could hold us in thrall by convincing us of our limitations?
Well, Goenka has a go. “So long as these deep-lying complexes remain in the unconscious,” he says, locating them in dead legs and irritable bowels, “they are bound to bring misery in the future. The only way to eliminate them is to allow them to come up to the surface of the mind and pass away.” This happens automatically, he claims, if you experience feelings without reacting. In theory, sitting still for long enough would wipe out an entire lifetime’s worth of hatred and longing, along with their physical manifestations. In practice, this seems rather far-fetched.
Nevertheless, I can’t deny the evidence. My intestines have gurgled themselves out, for the time being at least, as have the neuroses that twist them. But that doesn’t mean I’m left buzzing on my subatomic kalapas, unless this alludes esoterically to oxygenating blood. Behind the mystique, there’s little more to the course than learning not to respond to sensations, although this alone can be liberating. As long as you’re aware, you focus on the present, instead of running endless mind-movies of before and after shots. And that presence unwinds ingrained habits, once you witness how you give them so much power.
You don’t need Vipassana to do this though, and wisdom’s a whole lot more than the substitute habit on which some practitioners seem to hook themselves. There’s a whiff of slave morality about their conflation of composure with compassion, a passivity that’s as stifling as holding a hand above your head until the arm withers into a chicken wing. Acceptance needn’t be stoic. If anything goes, then everything’s permitted: Apollonian discipline is no more the path to God than Dionysian indulgence. However one finds peace, it’s there in every step if taken mindfully.
To generations of seekers, dope-fiends in particular, “do what thou wilt” has been the guiding amoral precept. But this maxim is more complex than it sounds. As preached by neo-pagans, it’s balanced by a duty to be discerning, to act with awareness or risk the consequences. The ideas stem from Saint Augustine, of all people, who prefaced the same slogan with an appeal to love, which he equated to God. “Let the root of love be within,” he urged. “Of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
For the past 20 years, however, getting loved up has meant necking pills. Compared to the holistic be-ins of the original Summer of Love, its Ecstasy-drenched rebirth was bastardised. Anarchists grew their own politics to defend parties from the police, but the animus of dance culture was otherwise ersatz. Even the drugs lacked spirit, no matter how effusive people’s ravings. “I am totally peaceful,” wrote the godfather of MDMA, Alexander Shulgin, in an account of his pioneering tests. “I have lived all my life to get here and I feel I have come home. I am complete.” That’s part of the problem. The hit is uncomplicated, offering a fulfilment that’s never really attained, let alone a blessing. You don’t even have to set aside your ego for empathic clarity. If anything you indulge it, downing an extra dose to stay high.
So are drugs just the fast food of the Gods? Shulgin seems to suggest as much. “Our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” he says. “We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” Without conscious awareness though, especially as it starts to wear off, Ecstasy’s no more a guarantor of enlightenment than staring at the wall. As a Zen monk would have it, “drugs do not go with meditation,” although “meditation goes wonderfully with drugs.” To clarify the koan, pills can sidestep all the exertions that stifle union with the timeless, but they’re not about to start a revolution, in the head or anywhere else. To find the meaning of life, we have to give it one ourselves.
LOVEMAKING MACHINES
Where, then, to begin this transformation, away from the confines of retreat? “Meditate one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening,” urges Goenka, and then some. “When you are working, all attention should be on your work; consider it as your meditation at this time.” The same holds for eating, or any other everyday action: nothing’s too routine to wake you up. “Just do what you do, completely, fully,” and “a change should come for the better,” measurable by reactions to adversity. “How quickly,” he asks in his parting discourse, “do you regain a mental balance, and start generating love and compassion?”
Down between the trees at the bottom of the field, an inscription appears in the mud. It’s right in the middle of the path I’ve trudged on countless laps, where once there was a countdown of days. “Love remains,” it says. A savant boast, or incitement to necrophilia? Words can so easily distort, but the heart of the teaching is just that: heart. And we each have to cultivate our own. The course is about peeling onions, not what might be found inside. When I ask our surrogate teacher, he confines his response to the cryptic. “Equanimity is wisdom,” he says, “and that’s purity.” Do I really feel any the wiser?
The mantraps of language yawn wide like fairground mirrors. “Most people,” concluded the psychologist Erich Fromm, “see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.” This drives an obsession with selling ourselves, and the triumph of style over substance. “In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails,” Fromm wrote, “there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labour market.” Engorged with infinite longing, everyone’s trying to seduce a buyer into affirming their self-worth.
But love, whether brotherly, romantic or universal, is more about giving than getting. So where does it actually come from? It’s clearly not bestowed by a skyfairy: the world is cruel and unjust, and ordinary people help to keep it that way. Yet somewhere inside our striving for happiness croaks a voice of irrational reason. When not just tuned out as winsome, it’s a source of supernatural strength. Believing in it takes an act of faith in itself, belief against the odds in humanity. And that’s what we need to make peace with ourselves, to surrender to the softness within.
It’s not a mark of passivity to stop fighting. Instead, says Goenka, it’s about becoming “capable of taking positive action that is helpful to oneself and others,” even if it has to be firm and, in extremis, physical. “One takes strong action to help the erring person,” he says, but it will only be effective to the extent one has “only love and compassion for the person” on the receiving end. That takes openness, ninja-like movements from stillness, and above all a balanced mind. This naturally curbs aggression, towards oneself and the wider world, whose consciousness comprises our own. If I’m less caught up in status anxiety, I’ve got more time and inclination to concern myself with others. And the oneness of love nurtures kindness for what remains of “me” beyond narcissist fantasy. Well, that’s how it feels after 10 days tuning out of angst, which seems as irrelevant as bodily discomforts when perceived as anyone’s, and therefore no one’s in particular. What better way to sum it up than transforming suffering into happiness?
When we’re finally allowed to start talking again, I find I don’t really want to. The release might be welcome, but words feel superfluous and the torrent of opinion invasive. I don’t mind seeing through the eyes of others, but I don’t want to think in cobbled cant, inevitable as that may be if comment comes cheaper than insight. After chatting to my roommates, and dodging the lunchroom babble, I wander round the grounds with a schoolteacher, who tells me about his meditation classes for teenagers. “It’s just a way of stretching the mind,” he says, “and giving it a rest. All very normal really.” If life’s about trying to be happy, and ultimately sharing this with others, why not start the day by focusing on precisely that?
The point, in the end, is “just do it”, only minus the corporate branding. Goenka calls it workism, the simple discipline of starting where you are with realism, and no real focus on outcome, beyond the immediate. “Be the change you want to see,” as Gandhi counselled, before fraudsters corrupted the slogan. There’s no point courting approval, or claiming “I coulda been a contender.” The only way to find out is to try, which means stubbing out smokescreens, and ripping up the addict’s excuse note. “Modern man,” as Fromm stressed, “has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with his artificial, prettified picture of pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads.”
As a writer, craft hinges on keeping it real, a task often at odds with The Way Things Are. Blizzards of propaganda and distraction keep the world contented in servitude. Corporations crave drones and rapacious consumers, and people seem all too ready to oblige. We’re in hock to neophiliacs, and the profits subordinating our values, with few defences left but the vagaries of words. The biggest lesson of history is that we never learn its lessons. Change only comes from within, to the limited extent that it can, but with compassion it radiates with force. That’s how communities will bond in the future, forged from a decaying civilisation to withstand its impending collapse. Hope demands a narrative to subvert the stories that deny our potential to cooperate autonomously. All we can do is make it up.
Ideally, we’ll do so in practice, and by practising manifest proof. But when it comes to the defence of realism, who can say for sure what’s the truth? Only priests, psychics and the hysterical claim to know what can’t be measured or proved, and their urge to save souls is usually a front for controlling them. However we intellectualise, we still have to live, which we’re obviously doing regardless. But doing it mindfully can bust the manacles that condemn us to wage slavery. In effect, then, the aim is to live for nothing, shedding false ambitions and the tensions of failure and success, if not those of earning a viable living. Being a nobody opens vistas of possibility, where sincere ambition can thrive. All it takes is commitment, and the humility to accept what is, however galling.
So what happens next, now the course is almost over? The devil inside suggests we go home and get slaphead stoned, but I’m tired of stuffing holes with premium hash. Something far more precious could be growing in that space. It’s no longer a matter of suppressing desire, or even exploring its nature. I could smoke, I suppose, with awareness and monitor my yearning for oblivion until I roll another joint. But that seems like a waste of time. I’ve been doing it half my life already. Maybe, on occasion, I’ll raise the odd conscious chilam to Shiva. Or then again maybe I won’t. Either way, strictures seem pointless, a one-hit overdose of moral clarity, with all the attendant bloviations.
The middle way defies description, because it’s all about living experience. Even talking about this reality gets shaky, implying the observer’s not part of it. Of course, we’re all rolling around in the muck, getting at best a partial glimpse of what’s out there. But as long as I can face myself, I’ve found there’s not much left to fear. Nothing used to scare me like the loss of identity, discovering gaps in my cherished self-image. But if they can’t all be plugged forever, then what is there left to cling onto? Why keep knotting up my innards with the debris of death? Why make panic a habit?
“In the province of the mind,” noted John Lilly, a doctor who experimented with acid in the 1960s, “what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially.” What’s more, he continued: “These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the presence of the mind, there are no limits.” I’m starting to get an inkling of what he’s on about, only a dozen or so years after first freaking out.
“Life is an illusion,” whispers The Cosmos. “Choose a nice one.” The thought of skinning up promptly passes, an impersonal changing phenomenon like all the rest. “Not for me, thanks,” I burble into the ether. “These days, my drug is myself.”
