HOW TO GET ENLIGHTENED
I had the vague sense that things had gone wrong when they locked the padlock on the steel gate behind me.
It said “Yale” on the brushed steel face of the lock. This becomes important later.
A cold February day in Hong Kong right near the border of mainland China, Wednesday at 2pm, and I have just checked in for 10 days of all meditation, all day long.
No, seriously.
All. Day. Long. 4am-9pm of silent meditating. Every day. For 10 days.
I don’t recommend that you do this. I would have said that to you even before the story I’m about to tell.
The casual meditator certainly doesn’t need to do a 10-day silent meditation retreat in the Buddhist Vipassana or “Insight” meditation tradition. I was looking for something a little bit deeper in my practice, and there are hundreds of Vipassana centers all around the world, as I learned when I read Joseph Goldstein’s excellent book, The Experience of Insight.
So this was all good.
But why the locked gate? Why the barbed wire running in thick strands over the top of the gate?
Presumably to stop anyone from getting in to the retreat compound, which was essentially a makeshift camp of steel sheds, outdoor showers, and a suspect drainage and sewage system that basically left plumbing out altogether and just let everything run into holes in the ground.
It wasn’t exactly dirty, but it certainly wasn’t clean.
Being there it seemed sort of fine, but back at home 10 days later, all of my clothes and gear smelled like cat piss, which is clearly how I smelled the entire time.
Vipassana meditation retreats could be seen as kicking off the “mindfulness” training that is so popular these days.
Mindfulness of course being the opposite of “mindlessness.” Which doesn’t really sound that great, does it.
It’s hard to argue with mindfulness.
Mindfulness meditation made its way to the West from Theravaden Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, popularized by the very charismatic and extremely fat teacher Goenka. It was imported to the USA by a cohort of longhaired hippies who had tuned in, turned on, and dropped out of the whole bad vibe of the Vietnam war. This was around the same time that Zen showed up on American shores, as the country, flying high on psychedelics, started seeking something beyond soldiers dying and conservative Christianity.
The whole setup is brilliant really.
You check in, for free, to a 10-day retreat. They lodge you, feed you with tasty vegetarian food and teach you how to meditate, and at the end if you wish to give a donation, great. If not, no problem. The quality of the facilities vary of course. Some are beautiful centers tucked away in the rolling green hills of Massachusetts.
Some are near the border of China and smell like cat piss.
That said, it’s pretty ungracious to complain when it’s ALL FREE! They don’t even suggest a donation amount, just give in proportion to the value that you feel you got from it.
There are a few commitments one has to make to participate.
The first is to Noble Silence, which means that for the entire time you do not talk. You do not write. You do not read. You do not look anyone in the eye. You check in your mobile phone at the door and don’t get it until 10 days later. This may sound hard for some of you. Or all of you.
Next is that you commit to meditating, in a communal hall, at the prescribed times. The prescribed times are pretty intense. The schedule is the same every day and looks like this:
Finally, while the food is healthy vegetarian and tasty, you only get 2 meals a day, breakfast and lunch, and then 1 piece of fruit at 5pm. Believe me, after meditating all day, and no prospect of dinner, an apple never tasted so good.
The beds, covered in mosquito net, looked like baby cribs and stretched out about 5 feet 9 inches long (1.75 meters).
My body is 6 feet long. This was a problem.
Or rather, it was a problem if I wanted to sleep stretched out as opposed to curled up in the fetus position.
And the pain. The pain is hard to describe. Having never given birth I don’t have a frame of reference, but I’m thinking that meditating for 10 hours a day while holding erect posture may be similar to the pain of childbirth. My closest approximation to something I’ve actually done is that it is sort of like getting tattooed for 8 hours straight in traditional Japanese style.
Breaks during meditation were not tolerated, not meditating with the group was not tolerated, falling asleep was not tolerated.
Blowing one’s nose loudly during meditation, rustling around in thick down jackets, scratching, belching, and farting emphatically in the meditation hall were all tolerated.
The practice instructions for the first 3 days were to notice your breath as it enters the nostrils. If you do this for approximately 30 hours over 3 days, you start to notice some interesting things about your breath.
On Day 4 they introduced the main Vipassana practice. Which is essentially a fancy body scan. My first reaction to those instructions was that I have 3 meditation apps on my iPhone that are better than this bullshit.
I stand corrected.
If you continuously do a body scan for 70 hours over 7 days, you start to notice some interesting things about your body.
Things got a little weird.
In a vastly altered state I would wander around on the small grassy plot (think prison exercise yard) between sessions of sitting, and it must have been around Day 5 when I started talking to the lock Yale as if he was my friend. I named a small shrub on the other end of the yard Kyle, and walking back and forth in the yard in a daze I had numerous conversations with both Yale and Kyle. Amazing what one can learn from a padlock and small tree when one is fucked up from calorie deprivation, sleep deprivation, and all meditation, all day long.
On Day 8 I got angry. Like really really really angry. It’s a bit odd to have one’s heartbeat clocking at about 160 beats a minute, simply sitting there on a cushion meditating. I was angry at petty work things, angry at my fellow meditators, angry at myself. I then had a euphoric unexplainable experience during body scanning where my body dissolved and I became a sort of body-less consciousness that wasn’t breathing, but was being breathed.
The pain subsided, I could sit forever. I stopped taking breaks between sessions. Just sat and sat and sat and transcended space and time.
And then after that experience, at about 5pm on that day, I decided to leave.
Basically, I had won at meditation. No reason to stay any longer. (For the record, I don’t think you’re supposed to win at meditation.)
I did all the sessions for the rest of the day and then at 8pm that evening after the last sitting I said my first words in 8 days to the very weird yet harmless staff member looking after us, Louis, which were “Louis, I’m leaving.”
Louis, in somewhat of a panic, said, “I need to talk to the teacher first.”
Which gave me the uncomfortable feeling that the Yale padlock on the door, and the barbed wire around the top of the fence, weren’t to keep people out. It was to keep us in.
So then I said my second words in 8 days.
Which were “Louis, open the fucking gate.”
The gate was opened, I departed into the dark night to find a bus or taxi back to Hong Kong, wishing my fellow meditators well, and wondering what they would think about my empty bed that evening.
I’m not sure how the meditation retreat ended, but I’m pretty sure that it didn’t end with eating a Snickers bar and smoking a joint, which is how mine ended.
I’ve gone on to do other retreats. In fact, I’ve spent more than 20 days in the past year in silent retreat. So in spite of my tone here, this whole thing actually works for me.
It might work for you.
It might not.
Buyer of spirituality, beware.
Brian Newman is an Asia-based Executive Coach who hopes that you may be happy, well, and liberated from suffering.