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?

No comments: