#writing
On Meditation
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I discovered meditation. The term probably came to prominence in my mind sometime in my early 0’s, five or six, and back then I likely related it loosely to sitting around for long periods of time in silence, or a bald fat guy who always seemed to be laughing in the wood carving of him my dad had. Later on, meditation began to incorporate new ideas. It embodied TM, or transcendental meditation, a type of meditation popularized by David Lynch that supposed that the careful repetition of a mantra could promote awareness of higher states of consciousness. I also learned about the notion of Zen through books like Gödel Escher Bach, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These books incorporated a flurry of ideas, but on Zen they discussed an idea called anti dualism, which posits that all things in the Universe are not separate, and that our distinctions between them are illusory distinctions to aid in a pragmatic navigation of the world. This is an interesting topic and I am not doing it justice, but I’ll leave it for another day. My point in saying this is that while my understanding of meditation expanded as I grew older and discovered more of what the world had to offer, I never once seriously engaged with meditative practice. My time spent meditating by this point was likely less than a half dozen hours in twenty years, if that.
My intimate association with meditation first began with a girl, which is as good a reason as any to begin anything. This isn’t about her, but she’s essential to my motivations behind the topic of the essay so I’ll share a bit about her.
I met her in China on a trip run by my school. We missed each other in the orientation, in the airport, and in the chaotic gathering of the hotel lobby before everyone went to bed and then again in the morning for breakfast and again on the bus to the first attraction. It was later, after we’d all filed off and been split again into groups, in a stairwell, that I noticed her. She was beautiful, of course. She stood out in a crowd. She was undeniably unique—the single one of her kind—a starlight gem even then in China where I met her. She wore conservative clothes and a peripheral demeanor, fitting the cold weather and tourist-etiquette. But later on I would know her by a lack of shoes, flowy clothes and colorful colours. By a lack of makeup and simple hair, psylocibin and Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, a smell of frankincense and patchouli that travelled everywhere she went and lingered deeply in the air. Even there so muted there I felt an immediate fundamental attraction, like a proton on neutron, and a deep want to simply occupy her space.
We got along well almost immediately. The conversation and connection flowed effortlessly. I remember writing in a journal that talking to her was like “breathing fresh air”, a nice respite from my prior experience, which distinctly trudged along Sisyphean-ly as if through mud. Before long we were sharing more intimate moments, and I account those experiences with a great cognitive shift that made me who I am now, in terms of the experiences I now have an open mind to and the things I’ve learned to expect and desire in my life.
At some point she mentioned she’d meditated in the past, following a practice known as Vipassana. She told me that she’d done it for a few years at that point after attending a 10 day course in the desert near Joshua Tree and the Mojave Desert, but had stopped after some time. Later on, by some alignment of identity (or seeking thereof) she started meditating again, and I remember distinctly she’d get up at six in the morning and meditate for an hour, every day, before lazily coming back to bed to get up at a later time.
A few months later I decided to attend one of these sessions myself. I signed up for a course at the same center she had gone to, a quaint little complex out in the small desert town of Twenty-Nine Palms. With an average Summer Temperatures of 104°F (40.0°C) and meagre population of ~28,000, it is known for little besides serving as a gateway into nearby national parks, and, briefly, as the namesake of a short-lived skincare product line once associated with Jared Leto.
I drove out to the facility, which covered maybe 3 acres of desert. The buildings were spread out in a splatter connected by rock-lined path. There were the living quarters, each consisting of a large shared bathroom space and simple rooms, each with nothing more than a bed, an alarm clock, and a cabinet. Each room was shared by two people and split by a curtain which covered only half the width of the room at a time and hardly went to your knees. At the nucleus of the center was the meditation hall, a big empty room with benches for the teaching assistants, a set of pillows arranged in a grid on the floor, and a modest arrangement of wall speakers, lights, and tv sets facing inward. Lastly there was the dining hall, which doubled as the welcome center. Notably, the entire place was mirrored across an invisible center line, from the buildings themselves to the trails between them, so that the program could be split up by gender. The meditation hall and the dining hall, positioned on this axis, were reflected, with a symmetrical arrangement of tables, chairs, and serving station. It was as if the complex had been designed on one side and then doubled over like a Rorschach card. I found this somewhat archaic but the concept was pragmatic: It’s pretty hard to maintain consistent focus if there’s any possibility of comingling; better, perhaps, to destroy the impulse altogether. It would seem curiosity was not entirely suppressed however. Later, while walking the trails or between meals and meditations I’d sometimes steal a glimpse across the veil, only to see a staring back at me.
While people continued to arrive, the other people all sat around tables with tea or fruit. Personally I was intrigued by anyone who had decided to undertake such a course. Anyone in the orbit of meditative techniques and willing to depart from regular life must surely be interesting. There was Smalls, an English teacher from Los Angeles who had done the program 10 times in the past twenty years. We quickly took to talking about everything from hitchhiking to mindfulness to Hamlet. I could tell he was a teacher not just in job but at heart. He would talk, and then listen, then question, navigating conversation gracefully in search of some driving focus. You could tell his drive was as much habit as in search of some greater virtue. Another man, whose name I’ve sadly forgotten, happened to be a Phd student who coincidentally had studied Shakespeare and Hamlet extensively. His passion and depth quickly outpaced my own, and I waned, but Smalls did a good job keeping the conversation grounded. I still remember him asking, with a smile, “But what does it mean? What is the essence?”.
There was Terence as well, a Japanese man in full adidas tracksuit (which he maintained for the duration of the course, including during its completion) who had just returned from a 40 day retreat before this. Afterwards he said he was off to China to attend a 100 day session. The apprehension of the 10 day course in front of me was daunting enough, and so the concept of a an almost half-year in meditation was unfathomable. I realized that one man’s mountain was sometimes merely another’s stepping stone.
Next was Louie, a quiet man who only talked when I prompted him. He was going down the path of living a life, but after discovering he had a brain tumor, had quit his job and travelled the world. He’d puked his guts out in South America in the throes an an Ayahuasca trip, undergone life saving surgeries which he was ensured several times would kill him, and forgotten significant portions of his life.
There were other people as well, several of which I would get to know over the course of the meditation. My relationship with them would be very one-sided though. After the start of the course, I wouldn’t talk to any other attendees until its completion, and for a special reason.
In Vipassana, or at least in the course I was taught, you are obligated to observe something called Noble Silence. To quote from the handbook given to us at the introduction, Noble Silence means “silence of body, speech, and mind. Any form of communication with fellow students, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, etc., is prohibited”. This also included the handing over of our phones for the duration of the course. For ten days, we would do nothing but exist within the small bounds of the facility, eat two times a day (with a break for tea substituting for dinner), and meditate for at least ten hours a day. The thought of spending ten days in silence without even the ability to write was daunting to say the least, moreso because knowing myself, I would give the program the ability to argue its techniques, and that meant pursuing its teachings wholeheartedly. This didn’t mean that I was willing to adopt its beliefs and practices without consideration of their merit. I simply suppose that to fully understand the potential of something, it should have opportunity to present itself truthfully before considerations are made.
This is a good place to explain what Vipassana is. I’ll first use the explanation given by the organization itself: Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self-purification by self-observation. One begins by observing the natural breath to concentrate the mind. With a sharpened awareness one processed to observe the changing nature of body and mind, and experiences the universal truths of impermanence, suffering, and egolessness. This truth-realization by direct experience is the process of purification. The entire path (Dhamma) is a universal remedy for universal problems, and has nothing to do with any organized religion or sectarianism… …Vipassana eliminates the three causes of all unhappiness: craving, aversion, and ignorance. With continued practice, the meditation releases the tensions developed in everyday life, opening the knots tied by the old habit of reacting in an unbalanced way to pleasant and unpleasant situations.
In pursuit of clarity, reference to the course I took, or any readings from the organization, are specifically referring to the teachings of S.N. Goenka and the Vipassana Research Institute, an organization he founded in 1985 to help preserve and spread Vipassana to the greater world. If I am referring to a concept of Vipassana, it can likely be attributed to either the VRI or Goenka himself. Goenka learned Vipassana from the teacher Sayagyi U Ba Khin, a high ranking government official in the Burmese government turned spiritual leader who popularized Vipassana in the 20th century. The VRI, Goenka, and Sayagyi U Ba Khin trace Vipassana as a practice directly to the Buddha through a continuous line of teachers. It is said to have later disappeared from India, where it was considered a long-lost technique. Despite disappearing for 2500 years, it was purportedly preserved in Burma until being revived in the 20th century and later being popularized in India and the world at large. It grew for a time in India and surrounding regions, before Vipassanā hopped the pond in the mid-1980s. It entered a cultural moment already energized by Eastern spirituality, psychedelic experimentation, and the broader countercultural movement. Figures like the Beatles, who popularized Indian teachers and meditation, and Timothy Leary, who championed early psychedelic use and thought, had already made Western audiences receptive to practices exploring the mind and inner experience, and Vipassana quickly took hold in centers across the United States.
While there is little direct historical evidence linking contemporary Vipassana practice to the Buddha’s original practice, it is not my intent to imply that S.N. Goenka or his centers are being disingenuous in their teachings by appealing to a greater level of spiritual authority. Instead, I believe that the historical and current teachers of Vipassana aim to provide a meditative method that reduces suffering and promotes mindfulness across cultures. That said, it’s worth noting that the organization’s claims are not entirely historically verifiable, and instead adhere to a spiritual lineage as is common with many spiritual and religious practices.
After all the participants had arrived we had a small introduction to the program in the dining area and was then informed that we would go to the central meditation hall to formally begin the program. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about but I distinctly remember a feeling of nervous anticipation. We walked the short path to the hall and took our places among cushions laid out in a grid. We all faced forward at the center bench, which sat a male and female instructor respectively. I don’t want to spoil the specifics of the program for anyone interested in attending, but after a short ritual, the Noble Silence began and with that the start of the next ten days. We all arose and walked noiselessly out of the hall, as if under some spell yet to be understood. I remember stepping out of the hall with intrepidity, looking out at the sun sinking over the desert hills on that first warm summer night.