[Photo credit: Samuel Silitonga]
I spent a large part of my Vipassana retreat frustrated, for many reasons, but one in particular.
Like many predisposed to scribbling things on bits of paper, whether journaling or the journaling-and-then-some that constitutes actual writing, I was frustrated that I couldn’t write anything down while I was in there.
All communication banned, including writing to oneself, lest it contaminate what is very much a mental process that occurs as you while away your seemingly endless 10 days there — ‘brain surgery’ as the great teacher of Vipassana, S.N. Goenka, calls it.
I had so many great ideas.
And for all the astute internal observations I made about the environment we were in, with its extreme asceticism but hospital-like comfort (far from a beautiful ancient Japanese Zen temple that I’d pictured, lest there be any stimulation at all, even religious); for all the theory of meditation given out in the nightly lectures, or in the dozens of guided meditation sessions that last from before dawn until well after dusk, or observed through careful attention to your respiration; for all the insights and aha moments and slow dawning realisations that occur as I gained gradual, daily progression and took slow steps on mastery of my mind; for all my frustrations at not being able to write down my Top Ten Thoughts — it didn’t matter.
As soon as I got home I raced to my notebook, and my laptop, furiously writing and typing and willing forth again memories of my internal notes about what was happening, convinced that the genius would be lost forever if I didn’t get it down in writing fast enough.
Over the next month I spent hours typing up various documents with my “Top 5 things I learned on a Vipassana retreat”, or long-form essays about the lasting changes I’d experienced from the reflective and self-satisfied vantage point of a full month after the course.
Thousands of words, hundreds of revisions. New documents started again, new titles, different plans, different drafts, different visions of different types of publications who might actually give me the time of day to read the bloody things, if not actually publish them.
And none of them able to capture fully or quite as accurately all those brilliant ideas and insights and turns of phrase that my brain conjured up as I sat for the tenth hour of the day with my legs crossed and my back hunched and my mind trained carefully on the pain in my lower back and simultaneously darting back and forth over the question of what the hell I’ve done with my life.
A month on, I thought I had it all figured out, and I did in a sense, in my head. But even as I was typing the quoted words of Mr. Goenka, repeated over and over again throughout the course, one of a dozen different things I could have sworn was “the fundamental number one main point of Vipassana”, the endless cycle of body scanning and non-attachment forces one to learn “at the experiential level, not at the intellectual level.”
Words and learning and teaching and books and discussions are all well and good for guiding learning or clarifying, but learning by doing is the only way to learn.
Everything else is just an intellectual circus, or you could call it intellectual masturbation if you’re doing it alone and it’s that pleasant for you. For writers, it often is.
I left my writing for a month, having finally finished one or two (3,000 words each) of the ten word documents I’d produced and labelled and saved after a month of work, finally having given up the idea that I’d be the greatest published authority of Vipassana (of this year anyway), as my precious intellectual ideas were evaporating in my periphery and I was powerless to keep them in mind. “What was that clever phrase I used to describe how I felt on day 5, when the first positive shift in mood happened?”
“How did everyone look as they went about their individual and disjointed stretching routines side-by-side, unable to synchronise due to the lack of communication, a metaphor for modern urban life, like an old Radiohead video?”
Very clever indeed. All gone. I couldn’t even figure out what my own overall impression of it was. So many ideas, that I was unable to articulate. I knew what I’d learned — they’d told us lots of Buddhist theory in the lectures every night. Unable to grasp at them or to really understand if they applied. Had I actually put these lessons into practice?
Trying to catch thoughts. Intellectual gymnastics, cinema, circus, porn.
None of it matters.
But now that I’ve stopped thinking about it, I think I’ve found it.
Now that I’ve spent the last month doing things rather than thinking.
He did tell us that we cannot know the true nature of things just by being told. It’s just intellectual entertainment. Entertainment can be interesting, sure, but it doesn’t bring about any lasting change. It’s fleeting in its nature. We all did the Leaving Cert.
On the first day, shortly after arriving to the Dhamma centre in Chiba, Japan, I got chatting to an American/Irish guy who lives in Tokyo — an expat basically — who was about to start his sixth course of the last 20 years. I asked him what brought him back, what he got out of it.
“A permanent change” he said.
Sounded drastic.
And throughout the course it was drilled into us, in as much as something can be taught by drilling speech — intellectual learning, but a good attempt at it — one of the other of the many “fundamental number one main point of Vipassana” (I swear there were a few) — was Anicca — the impermanence of things. It’s a good point, in fairness.
“This too shall pass,” as someone else said, not Gandalf.
If you sit still for long enough the pains pass. If you let your mind wander long enough, it may wander somewhere dark or somewhere pleasant but it’ll leave again soon enough.
Physical pain doesn’t last forever, nor does mental pain. And good things come and go too. Just don’t resist. Resistance is ultimately a form of craving, or aversion.
So, through this over and over and over again you learn: Your thoughts are a slave to your body. The only thing you can control is how you react to things. How you act. ‘Non-judgment’ is another one of The Number One Main Point(s) of the whole exercise — you attach your ‘self’ to neither the good nor the bad, not your body or its sensations, or your thoughts about who you are, deep down.
Does anything last forever so? Maybe not, but there is a way to maintain some sort of consistency in your life. For all the brainwaves and the interesting thoughts and the referencing of what I thought I’d learned with other people’s experiences gleaned from the Google records telling me the mainstream Vipassana fad happened a few years ago, and intellectual messing and self-congratulating, evaporating pathetically into the realm of all the other things you thought you know because someone told you but you forgot and oh sorry yeah I’ll remember it next time and I’ll do it next time and I normally do that but I didn’t this time and that sounds cool yeah I’ve always been meaning to do that — no.
It’s action.
Experiential learning, he calls it.
There are many lessons you learn throughout the ten days of a retreat, with no external stimulation, no-one to talk to, no-one to influence your views, nothing to do, nothing to read, little to eat, nowhere to write down all your wanky thoughts (it’s for the best).
You do mental gymnastics over what you want to do with your life, what you have done, who you love and who you hate and why you constantly beat yourself up over this and that, or this person is like this and that, or this is how everything should be, and then:
You’re allowed to talk to all the real-life people sitting next to you at breakfast and lunch, or pacing around behind you in the yard at break times, and you’re allowed to discuss everything you’ve been through and been thinking and how you’ve been interpreting the thought patterns and the relationship between the body and mind and this and that and “oh I’ve figured it all out in my wonderful brain”.
No. You haven’t. You begin talking to people again on day 10, the day the noble silence is lifted, and it doesn’t even matter what you say. The immediate discussions with fellow students began with the expected
“How’d you find that?”
“Ah tough going, ya know yourself”
“Jayz I’m in bits”
Etc.
Before people got to know one another and their stories and discuss the finer points of what we’d just been through. The bodily sensations — I kept mostly in line with the expected stages of progression through the Vipassana technique, experiencing from day 7 onwards the feeling that every sub-atomic particle in my body was lighting up like a Christmas tree, an ultimate and superceeding sensation that dissolved all others in my body: pain, itchiness, the weight of my legs on the ground, moisture, dryness, the feeling of my clothing on my back, etc, and when this equanimity of physical sensation is paired by the trained mind with the eternal coming and going of thoughts in the mind, one trains one’s body — one learns at the experiential, not intellectual, level — about the true nature of things.
The course puts a lot of strain on your body and mind in a deliberate effort to exhaust you mentally and push your darkest and wackiest thoughts to the surface, to force you into contention with them. A large part of this, and the most attention-grabbing part of the description of the course is the 10 days of silence. How little did I know how effective it would be.
It’s such that on day 10, it doesn’t matter what you were thinking; nor does it matter what you say.
The simple act of speaking to people again is enough to reset your brain and bring you back down to earth. All anxieties melt away, evaporate, along with a lot of what you might call your ‘good thoughts’. All those interesting ideas you think you came up with all by yourself over the previous week and a half.
Why is this? It’s an action. It’s not what you say, or think, it’s how you say or think it.
It seems that the best way to have better thoughts is by thinking less.
And how would you do that?
Do more.
So where does that leave me? Isn’t all this written evidence of what I’ve learned? Yes and no.
The reason I haven’t been able to articulate fully what I’ve learned is because you need to learn by doing, and now, a little further than a month on from when I gave up trying to explain myself and discern any changes in my nature, my personality, my self, and two months on from the course, it’s slowly become apparent due to not thinking about it.
The Buddha passed on this meditation technique (supposedly) as “an art of living”, and that is what is to be learned.
It doesn’t matter what you think, or say, or wish, or hope for, or what your personality is.
It doesn’t matter what you think, because your thoughts will come and go.
All that matters is the doing.
In a reality where nothing is permanent, the only consistency can be achieved by willful action.
From the early stages of life our bodily senses react to emotional stimuli in the world around us — i.e. the whole world around us and the people in it — and what follows in life is a cycle of acting and reacting and thoughts forming based on these reactions and gradually a sense of self forms.
Vipassana is about breaking this fight-or-flight cycle, and the way to do this is to detach yourself from your thoughts and form new habits based on what you want.
Habits compound. Good actions become good habits, bad actions become bad habits. Same goes for thoughts. Outside influences don’t come into it. And it doesn’t matter what the action is. Brushing your teeth, holding the door for someone, telling someone you love them, keeping your house clean, saving the world. You know what you have to do.
On different days, thinking of the same thing produces different perspectives, different points of view. Positive or negative. “She hates me.” Vs. “She’s actually alright.” The difference? Physical wellbeing and attunation with bodily state.
Stress and exhaustion give you a negative worldview. Get some rest, drink plenty of water, and then come back to me with your opinions. It didn’t work? You might have to make being healthy a habit first. The body controls the mind controls the body controls the mind.
Everything you do matters, so pay attention to what you’re doing and how you do it.
A Vipassana journey is personal but the lessons are universal. Some people realise things about themselves or their life circumstances. Lots of people say they “couldn’t do a retreat because I’m afraid of what I’d learn about myself.” It sounds like they’d just be sick of themselves very soon after starting. Probably ones who would benefit most about learning how to think. Or not think.
The only things you’d learn are that you can act, or you can’t.
I learned how to meditate: it doesn’t matter unless you meditate every day. It doesn’t matter what you think of it, it’s how you do it. No results? Keep doing it. Still not working? Stop thinking about it and maybe some sense might seep into your stupid little brain.
I learned that I think about this and that too much: it doesn’t matter unless you stop thinking.
I learned that the object of my thoughts does not determine whether you see that thing or person as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s your physical state and mood on the day that determines it. If I’m well rested, I am positive, if not, I see bad guys lurking everywhere. You’re right and you’re wrong; the truth is two sides of the same coin. It doesn’t matter. Use this information to form healthy habits.
Nobody is anybody, and life is habit. It doesn’t matter how you see yourself, or how the world sees you, you are what you do.
If you want to be cool, be cool. But learning how to be cool doesn’t do a bloody thing. The only way to learn is by doing.
The only way to live is by doing.
So all of this has come to me a lot more slowly than I was expecting, as I desperately tried to grasp the ghosts of ideas and daemons that I was so attached to — again, against the explicit teachings of the Goenka, because intellectual teaching is no good.
I lost my meditation habit a week after I got out of the centre (I was travelling a lot), and then despite keeping it up for a couple of weeks after I got home from Japan (I was convinced it wasn’t for me).
I also relapsed on the cigarettes around the same time.
And I went on the beer a few times when I got home, and I haven’t always eaten healthily.
And some days I spend an hour or two on my phone, especially when I’m hungover.
No veganism for me, despite it clearly having been the healthiest diet I’ve had in a long time; and I still contribute to the butchering of trees being farmed for takeaway coffees in disposable cups.
I still get stressed out and get a bit anxious when I talk and get pissed off at people and I try to write every day at least this many words and sometimes it seems like I haven’t learned anything at all but there’s a reason why Buddhists don’t go to confession.
It’s just intellectual wanking and spiritual gatekeeping and public shaming and an institutionally imposed sentence to hell.
Had I learned nothing?
But
I’ve slowly realised
That I’ve learned how not to do those things
Or how to do the things I want to do, how to get where I want to go, how to be who I want to be
And that’s what’s slowly come to my conscious realisation over the last month, it’s wandered into my mind: that even when I fall, this too shall pass.
It’s by doing. My whole life has been based around habit-formation over the last couple of months, because that is now instinctively how I do things. I spent ten days programming my body — not my mind — to learn by doing. Meta-programming. Resetting the hardware.
I’ve come to realise that although I beat myself up on off-days — the days I’m slacking or the times I’m not who I want to be — I get back at it the following day and they seem to bring a catapult of motivation with them into the next day. And life is a long time, it’s not measured over a week. Slowly it’s dawned on me that my default mode is set to action, and if I want to learn or do or be anything it takes doing, it takes repetition and it takes time.
I no longer look for quick fixes. My body understands that it doesn’t work like that.
And so I get back to work.
The body learns and the brain catches up.
The artists figure things out long before everyone else. Before they even know what they’ve created.
Genius is perspiration not inspiration.
Do the work and trust your instincts — they will know better than your brain.
Somewhere in this letter are pretty much all of the lessons I consciously wrote down or researched in the days and weeks after I did the course, but it’s only now that I’ve been able to show rather than tell — even to myself — just how the course has influenced me. It’s only now that I’ve stopped actively thinking about it and desperately trying to fit the round pegs of abstract ideas into the square holes of my daily life that things have come to me. It’s only by working on the habits I want to instil in my life with full attention to the actions themselves rather than my thoughts on them, that things have settled.
And whatever your views on the merits or not or the intellectual wankery of this letter, I’ve written it freely, in one sitting (with revisions after a good night’s sleep); it’s mostly come to me as the most natural and well-articulated expression of what I learned on the course — again, whether that’s any good or not is a different matter, but it’s as truthful to myself and to the point of Vipassana as I can get.
There are details about the daily routine and experience and theory and whatnot of the course but this is about what Vipassana teaches you, its lasting effects (can probably be largely applied to other forms of meditation, or any practice or skill whether running, surfing, martial arts, cooking, language, etc.
Thus is the beauty of its lessons — remember: less intellectualising, more doing. It doesn’t matter what you think you’ve learned, only what your body is doing thereafter.
Remember: the body learns and the brain catches up.
And not many people are the finished article, certainly not you or me. Everything is a work in progress, and always will be, and that’s the point.
But I do think enlightenment is possible in one’s life time. Rather than perfection seek the pursuit of perfection.
So I see yer man’s permanent change now. It’s not something to point at on a given day — it’s an attitude to life — an art of living — the seed of which is deeply embedded in your body, and must be cultivated as much as your stupid little brain can remind itself, so that it becomes you.
Because your brain is full of shit.
Gav