Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Meditation Camp Part II





How strange the body.
How strange the throat. Like a drain where all the emotions get caught.
How strange the master.
How strange the mark.
How strange the names we give our lives.

I met the master on the first day of camp. Indeed! It was not Goenkaji, though he was our master, our teacher, no doubt about that. In fact, it had been sort of strange to slowly understand and get used to the set up. There were two teachers there, physically present, sitting crosslegged on the dais in front of the meditation hall, facing the students, silent and still as statues. Their main function was “occupying space” as one of my friends who’d been there before put it. I had thought that a weird thing to say, but it turns out it was true. Well, almost true. Their main function was occupying space and acting as a “finglonger” or button pusher for Goenkaji, for every teaching was recorded on video and every meditation was recorded on cd. So the teachers would come in, and the man (they were a couple) would push the button and then we’d all settle into our seats, some of us (if you were like me) making last minute adjustments in the hopes that this stance would not be too painful to last the whole hour.

Of course, once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Because what I’m talking about it aditthan, or “strong determination” which starts on the 4th day and translates into passing 3 of the roughly 11 hours you spend meditating to be spent in complete stillness. So even if you have a throbbing pain, a cramp or an “intensified, gross sunsation” as Goenkaji puts it, you need to stay still and observe.

The aditthan sittings were, as you might imagine, the hardest part of the course, but also the most instructive. That is why I get ahead of myself. But first, let me tell you about the master.

So the first three days are spent learning anapana, which is an exercise to calm and still the brain. Basically you observe your breath. You observe the sensation inside your nostrils, on the edges of your nostrils, throughout the entire triangular area of your nose and upper lip. You observe the breath coming in, and the breath coming out-- the small wind it makes, whether it’s hot or cold, left nostril or right nostril, etc. You also observe any other sunsation that happens on this area of your face-- for instance, an itch. The whole point of the exercise is to concentrate the mind on these sunsations and TO NOT REACT to them. That’s key. You got to just observe. Don’t react.

By the way, the reason I call them sunsations is sort of an in-joke I had with myself the whole time. That’s how Goenkaji says sensations with his Indian/Burmese accent, and once I got to thinking of them as sunsations I couldn’t help but be transported into some bizarre TV commercial where a soft drink or shampoo was being peddled to me-- or even like a new brand of skittles.

Anyway, so the first day you wake up at 4 (as you will on all the following days) and promptly go back to sleep. Then you wake up at 4:20 again, with the sound of bells ringing next to your cabin, make a murky pot joke to yourself, thrown on your sweater, gloves, hat, scarf, grab your flashlight and make your way out to the meditation hall under a starlit sky. I remember this feeling from the one night I spent at Thich Nhat Han’s Plum Village Monastery in France. It’s great. Really, I really love being under the night sky, walking towards a warm space to meditate. I love the literal enlightenment that happens as you sit in that space for however many hours. At Plum Village the stained glass windows of the meditation hall were lit faintly but consistently by the time we opened our eyes for meditation, and before breakfast. Here, at North Fork, the sky never got quite bright, but we could see the stars mostly erased and a coat of light visible at the line of the mountains around us.

So you start your meditation at 4:30. Some folks chose to sleep in until breakfast, or meditate in their rooms. I wasn’t sure if this was optional, or if I should get on my high horse about their cheating ways, but what I did know is that this is the one part of the day that I wouldn’t miss.

Especially *also* since it made breakfast so much more fun. Attractive. Whatever words you may apply to one of two meals served at 6:30 in a place where the rest of the hours are spent enduring excruciating pain.

Haha, of course I exaggerate for effect.

... or do I?

I actually don’t remember the first day being too hard. The schedule itself never changed-- 4:30-6:30 meditation, 8-9 group meditation, 9-11 meditation in the hall or in your dorms, 11-12 breakfast, 12-1 rest, 1-2:30 meditate in hall or in your room, 2:30-3:30 group meditataion, 3:30-5 meditation in the hall or in your room, 5-6 teatime!, 6-7, group meditation, 7-8:30 MOVIETIME! (actually it’s a video of Goenkaji giving a Dharma talk but he’s quite charming and funny and it feels so good to do something other than meditate, and it feels so nice to have some human contact that I felt each day around 7 that I was about to go to a summer blockbuster). 8:30-9 more meditation, and 9-10 rest & lights out.

So, as you can see, pretty much dry toast the length of the day. Of course, I found ways to spice it up with my jokes and pithy observations but I’m not quite sure that was the point...

... And STILL I haven’t told you about meeting the master. But now I’m really ready.

The first day wasn’t that hard, though it sure was repetitive. But one thing that started happening is-- I started seeing faces during my meditation. This is a very odd thing for me, because I don’t usually get any kind of visuals while meditating. And, though I’ve only been doing Buddhist meditation practice for the past few months, I’ve been meditating in Savasana, post-yoga for the last 7 years. Even guided meditations, with their visualizations and stuff, are sort of hard for me. I can’t quite disengage my brain which asks-- well, am I going down these steps too fast-- should the walls be this color, am I controlling this too much? even while the teacher is telling us how to descend into our unconscious realms.

So it was quite a surprise when I saw my first face. And it was quite a face. In fact, it was a head. It was the severed, bloody head that Kali holds in one of her hands. Then, later on in the day, I saw some sort of (I want to say, in a bizarrely midwestern fashion) ethnic face. I think it might have been a mask, like an African mask or a Hittite statue or something. Then, I’m quite sure I had a brief flash of an Asian face. Now I’m the first to suspect myself of creating these visions (especially since there’s such a clearly discernible pattern here) but I know I didn’t consciously think them up. So, it’s actually the pattern that’s suspect, that I might have superimposed on the actual experience as one imposes order and consistency on to a dream when trying to remember or retell it.

And the next face was certainly not of my conjuring. Toward the later part of the day I was sitting on my cushion, trying dilligently to follow my breath, when all of a sudden I found myself looking into a huge eye. No, that’s not quite correct. I found myself being looked AT by a huge eye. Seeing the eye was startling enough, but to sense that it was actually looking back at me was, in a word, uncanny. I shivered and got goosebumps, and in the split second before that this is what happened: The eye looked at me, I got WAY scared but then almost immediately I decided to look BACK at it (this is my dream-training of many years-- don’t run away from what’s scary) and then, I can almost swear to you with a clear conscience that the eye crinkled with amusement.

Then I got the goosebumps.

It was such a singularly strange experience, so vivid and so bizarre, that I can’t help but think this was the eye of the master. There was someone, something, there. Might have been a different side of myself. Dunno. But since vipassana is open to the idea of other “beings” than the ones we know (there are like 9 worlds, it’s very complicated and I don’t get it, I mean, I don’t get if it’s supposed to be literal but since at the end of practice you wish for the happiness of “all beings” I suspect there is some belief in other beings than the ones we know about or can see. And of course, it makes total sense to me, instinctually, that there should be all kinds of beings out there that we don’t know). In fact, I’m most tempted to view my experience as something akin to an ant or a snail or something coming face to face with a little boy or girl. What does the ant understand of the experience?

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Meditation Camp Part I




My student told me to go. And I was ready for a teacher.
It was located in the Sierra Foothills. A modest cluster of cabins where the students lodge, and three central buildings: the men’s dining hall, the women’s dining hall, and the meditation hall, which I eventually came to think of as the spaceship.

The method is called Vipassana. It’s a form of meditation (the word means insight) that the Buddha Gautama is supposed to have himself practiced. Vipassana is practiced more in South East Asia, in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. The teacher of this course is named S.N. Goenka and he hails from Burma.

We were there to learn vipassana but you do not plunge straight into Vipassana. No. There are a lot of steps you need to go through. First, you get settled into your routine at the camp. The program lasts 10 days and is conducted in Noble Silence which means no speaking at all and no touching anyone and no looking in their eyes either. No gesticulations, no communication. The purpose of all these prohibitions is to make you get as close as you can to a Solitary retreat.

Of course, in practice, this is not so. You still stand in line with people for breakfast and lunch, you still recognize their shoes on the wooden racks outside the meditation hall, you still assign them names and life stories and generally manage to have relationships with them. Or, at least, I did. I had a crush on about 3 girls at any given time, one small feud that happened midway through, and numerous in-jokes about everyone else. Yes, my friends, the active, monkey, outward mind will glom on to whatever miniscule amount of information it has and squeeze the most out of it.

Actually, I was just talking about this with Heather. She was saying we’re social creatures and it’s normal for us to want to be with other people and therefore, to be outwardly inclined. I agree. And this is one thing I have trouble with-- reconciling Buddhism’s teachings with a non-monastic lifestyle. I know I’m not alone in this; Danielle has told me she has similar concerns, and my pops, some years ago, when I declared that I was thinking about becoming a nun said, very thoughtfully, while taking a spoonful of flan at the Divan Patisserie in Istanbul’s Baghdad Avenue: Yalnizlik Allah’a mahsustur. Which translates into: Solitude is God’s alone. He seemed to be repeating something he had learned, maybe long ago, but the fact that he said it so simply, without looking at me or trying to convince me in any way, made more of an impression on me than anything else.

Anyhows, so the camp is meant to create a monastic atmosphere, in fact, more of a hermetic atmosphere. Monastic it is, no matter the silence. The first night you get there you vow to take the 5 precepts which are simple enough: no killing, no stealing, no lying (easy when you don’t talk!), no sexual misconduct (easy when you don’t have sex!) and no intoxicants. This, Goenkaji explains to us over the video, is what’s called sila in Pali (an ancient and dead language that the Buddha spoke that we use in our lessons). It means morality. Any solid practice of vipassana needs to be based on flawless sila. So a monastic lifestyle makes this easy for the practitioners and, in fact, the vows are called “taking refuge” in the five precepts. So, like an umbrella, or a tent, you take shelter in perfect morality, at least in the action-sense. Your thoughts could still be awful and terrible, but at least you’re not acting them out.

I really like this taking refuge business, I must say. I just love that it’s an idea, so that means it’s always available. Maybe this is the essence of any religious longing-- the need for a constant refuge. Unlike a person or any circumstance or anything outside of you, the idea is always there. God is always there. Something-- something is always there. Always ready. Whatever happens you can take refuge in there, in this ever present place (of course, even then, it’s hard to put into practice. Just because something or someone is always available doesn’t mean you’re always willing to go to it, even though you might be in dire need). But anyway, I like that the phrase "taking refuge" physicalizes this very vague but strong psychic urge.

So we took our refuge on our first night, after a brief dinner and an "orientation" which seemed like just announcements and logistics. This made me terribly impatient. I wanted to know what we were going to do, I wanted to get started on my task. After orientation we had a little break and then met up outside the meditation hall-- the girls on one side of the building, the boys on the other. We were waiting to be called in and shown to our assigned spots. At first everyone was chatting and then we all quieted down. I'll never forget that feeling of standing around among the madrone trees, bundled up in the Sierra chill, with the stars fresh above us, waiting to be admitted into this building, this mysterious practice. Friends who had come together were saying goodbye to each other and hugging. It was so strange and so exciting. And once someone's name was called they would take their shoes off and just disappear inside. I took a deep breath of air, itching to find out for myself what was inside.