by Tim Parks
I had no problem with any of this.
There was one positive instruction: we must ask the teacher, a certain Edoardo Parisi, to teach us Vipassana. He was not proselytising. We must seek him out.
Repeating a formula that was read out to us, we asked. We wanted to be taught.
There was then a ‘guided meditation’.
The meeting room was a modern wood-and-glass extension built onto the side of the renovated farmhouse, itself perched on the steep slope of the mountain. Outside, rain fell steadily through the darkness. Inside, the only light came from burning logs behind the glass door of a stove and a dim lamp on the floor. The participants, men to one side, women to the other, sat cross-legged on cushions facing the teacher who was slightly raised on a low dais. Just one elderly lady had chosen a chair. Was it vanity, then, made me choose to sit cross-legged? Looking around as we removed our shoes and entered the room, I had simply copied the others. Against the wall there was a stack of cushions, hard and soft. I put two under my butt and pillows each side of my feet to support the knees. My ankles had to be yanked into position.
There was a long silence. The outside of the feet pressing against the mat would be the first to complain, I thought.
‘May all beings live in peace,’ the meditation began.
‘May all beings be free from all attachment and all sorrow.
‘May all beings be happy and enlightened.’
‘Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu,’ the more experienced meditators replied.
I was taken aback by the religious feel of this – the mumbo-jumbo ‘sadhu’ in particular – but accepted that it was a rigmarole that must be gone through if I was to enjoy the benefits of the days ahead. There was no assent in my mind. The idea that all beings might ever be free from sorrow was impossible and hence it was impossible for me to wish it. I remembered Emil Cioran dismissing utopian ideas that ‘do honour to the heart and disqualify the intellect’ and simultaneously warned myself that if I had come to pit my ‘superior’ intelligence against ancient formulas I might as well have stayed at home.
After another long silence we were invited to concentrate on the sensation of the breath crossing the upper lip as it enters and leaves the nostrils. Already the pressure of my left ankle bearing down on my right was painful. Already the straight back I had forced myself to assume was collapsing into a hunch. How could I concentrate on something so nebulous as breath on the lip in this state of discomfort? Lying down, I might have done it. Lying down I had learned to dispel the tension in my body. Thanks to Dr Wise. Cross-legged, tension was intensifying rapidly. Everything went rigid.
I wriggled. Perhaps I had got the position of the cushions wrong. They should have been tipped forward a bit.
I tried to adjust them, tried to sit still. This was hard work.
‘If thoughts should arise,’ the teacher at last intoned, ‘don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, just say to yourself: thoughts, fantasies, not my thoughts, not my fantasies, and bring your attention gently back to the breath crossing the lip beneath the nose. The in-breath crossing the lip’ – pause – ‘the out-breath crossing the lip.’
The voice was soft and reassuring and I tried to follow its instructions. At the same time it was now evident that I had made a mistake coming here. I would never sit through an hour in this position. It had definitely been a big mistake not putting a third cushion under my butt, plus something to ease the pressure where my crossed legs touched. ‘Not my thoughts,’ I repeated, disbelieving. When, for a moment, I felt a light breath on my lip, I clutched at it as a man falling into a fiery pit might clutch at a thread. It snapped. The fiery pit was my legs where pins and needles were advancing rapidly. Amid a turmoil of angry reflections, I remembered something I had translated once from a book on pre-Vedic philosophy: ‘So as not to be hurt, before coming near the fire, the wise man wraps himself in the meters.’ The arcane instruction had impressed, I remembered it, and I had a vague idea it might now be appropriate in some way, but it also sounded like something from Indiana Jones.
‘Thoughts, fantasies,’ I repeated determinedly and went looking for my breath again. It eluded me.
‘If pains should arise,’ came the teacher’s quiet voice, ‘don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, just say to yourself: aches, pains, not my aches, not my pains, and bring your attention gently back to the air crossing the lip beneath the nose. The in-breath crossing the lip’ – pause – ‘the out-breath crossing the lip.’
Saying ‘pain, not my pain’ worked even less than saying ‘thoughts, not my thoughts’. Whose pain, if not mine? After twenty minutes the pins and needles had crept up from my crushed ankles to my cramped calves. My thighs were simultaneously burning and numb. My curved shoulders were a rigid block. There would be no warm wave of relaxation tonight. Angrily, I hung on. When the hour mercifully ended, I couldn’t stand up.
So why did you come? I demanded of myself in bed. Surely you didn’t really believe this experiment would help you stand up straight. Who cared about standing up straight, anyway? Why had I chosen to give the business of posture such symbolic force?
Oddly, it now appeared that there was a gap between my actually being here, in this remote valley, sharing a room with two younger men (one snoring steadily), and some moment in the past when, presumably, I had had my good reasons for signing up to five days of Vipassana meditation.
Had I thought of it as penitence?
No. Since age fifteen I have refused to think of myself as a sinner.
I stayed awake for some time, got up to go to the bathroom, returned, listened to the man snoring, put in my earplugs, turned to the wall.
‘You were looking for a showdown with yourself,’ I muttered. That was it. A showdown with this tangled self, these tussling selves. You decided that without that showdown the pains would soon be back. Or other pains.
What form would the showdown take? I had no idea. But I had been told that, sitting in silence for days, people do come to a new knowledge of themselves. That was the goal. Knowledge, confrontation. To plumb the source of my tensions and defuse them once and for all. Settle once and for all that ‘tussle in the mind’.
Of course, I had no more believed I would be successful in this project than a knight setting out to find the Holy Grail supposes he will be the one chosen to recover it. At some deep level, I wasn’t even surprised to have spent a miserable hour merely verifying the fact that my hips, legs and thighs were too stiff for me to sit cross-legged. What else had I expected? Yet the following morning, after a tedious night taking care not to wake my room-mates as I padded back and forth to the bathroom, I went once more to the cushions, not to a chair. And I went without hesitation. I went cheerfully, expectantly.
In the end, I no longer believe that it is given to us to understand why we behave as we do. I should stop trying.
I say ‘the following morning’. In fact the gong sounded at four a.m. Dead of night. It was a rather beautiful gong, a sort of auditory moonlight rippling through the deep silence of the house, promising calm and clarity. I was already awake and went downstairs at once. In the kitchen were flasks of herb tea. I poured something minty and went outside to drink it under the eaves of the house looking out into cloud and fog. A woman about my own age came and lit a cigarette beside me. It wasn’t unpleasant, standing silently there together, listening to trees and gutter as they dripped, smelling her cigarette smoke in the damp air. I remember she shifted from one foot to the other. The not-talking actually made us more aware of each other’s presence.
At four thirty the gong sounded again and the meditation began. Unguided, two hours. Seventeen people breathing, sniffling, coughing. Some wore hoods or swathed head and shoulders in blankets against the chill, which gave the scene a monkish feel. I had built my seat a little higher and brought a T-shirt to fold between my ankles. I did not expect these small expedients would bring comfort, nor did they. After half an hour toes, feet, ankles, knees, thighs and hips welded together in a scorchi
ng pyre from which my curved trunk rose like the torso of some broken martyr. Round this carnage, thoughts flitted and circled like bats in smoke. It would be impossible to convey how many thoughts arose, or how ferociously they blocked all attempts to focus on my breath. There had been nothing of comparable intensity when I had begun the paradoxical relaxation at home with Dr Wise. If, for three seconds, I did focus wordlessly on the sensation of breathing, immediately a yell of self-congratulation was raised, followed by a pertinent reflection on the inappropriateness of such a yell, then another reflection, equally pertinent, that this verbalised statement of inappropriateness only compounded the problem, then another reflection that such pertinent reflections were stealing away the experience that I had come for, the experience of wordlessness. Reflection comes at the expense of being, I told myself. Perhaps especially when pertinent. I was pleased that I had framed the idea so succinctly. And ironically. Would I be able to remember these words at the end of the session? How could I make myself remember, without pen and paper? Oh, but what is the point, Tim, of trying to meditate if you are only interested in describing the perversity of everything that prevents you from doing so?
So it went on. A mental seething. A stampede of cows, flies buzzing round shit, rats at a corpse. By some cruel stroke of irony, our farmhouse was situated in a valley with at least three churches whose mixture of clocks chiming the hours and bells summoning the faithful kept one constantly aware of time passing, and thus hopeful of an end, but also constantly confused as to how much time had passed, and thus despairing when no end came. If I opened my eyes and turned a little I could see the watch which the companion to my left had placed on the floor beside him. But what was the sense of checking the time? What was the point of being here if I was merely yearning for the two hours to be over, my mind projected into the future when I was supposed to be savouring the present – ‘the present where there is no conflict’ the teacher had said in yesterday’s guided session? What did that mean? On the other hand, how savour the present when the present was pain, pain that I knew would dissolve the moment I made up my mind to move? But when I did move, swaying my trunk back and forth, for example, or, more radically, uncrossing and re-crossing my legs, then, after a moment’s relief, the hot pain returned stronger still. It was worse.
Accepting defeat, I opened my eyes. There was no sign of dawn. The dark windows were a glossy mirror. The fire glowed red. Raised on a low platform, the teacher, in his early sixties, balding, blond, with a fine, pointed nose, sat in perfect stillness, swathed in a thin white blanket. Around me, others too sat perfectly still. One young man in particular had a wonderfully straight back, a marvellously smooth face. The woman to my right sat in a half lotus, unflinching, motionless, her breast rising and falling very slowly and gently. I envied them. And I held on because of them. Something about that young man, at once virile and serene, focused and silent, seemed to rebut my sophisticated objections. Closing my eyes again, I struggled once more to find this elusive point where breath and skin met. Perhaps for a whole minute then, I had the impression that the air coming in and out of my nostrils was a silver thread passing through transparent water. All around me was dark still transparent water, not unlike that in the waterseller’s glass, and this delicate, mercurial thread of air ran gleaming across it connecting me to some distant point beyond my ken.
Had I left the retreat after lunch on day three, I would never have ‘meditated’ again. On the evening of the second day two young men disappeared. I heard angry voices from the garden during the afternoon break and at the evening session they were gone. If I had left with them, I could have read a book, or gone running, or canoeing, or for a walk with Rita and the dog. Halfway through the third morning, another place was empty. The maestro spoke calmly of ‘right effort, right concentration, right awareness’. ‘If you experience pleasure in your meditation,’ he said, ‘do not attach to it with yearning. If you experience pain, do not attach to it with aversion.’
Attachment with aversion was a new idea to me. But I sensed at once what he meant. It was like when I read an author I despised because I despised him, because I enjoyed thinking what a scandal it was that this man was a celebrity. Or when I kept complaining about a colleague at the university because my identity was intensified by my opposition to him. Or when I listened to the radio outside Ruggero’s study in order to loathe it. Did I attach to pain in the same way? Scratching sores. Was it possible that this grand showdown with myself that I had planned and been denied actually had to do with the pain I was now experiencing? The showdown was taking place without my realising it was the showdown. Why else would I continue to sit cross-legged, without a break, when others had chosen to remove to chairs from time to time?
This form of meditation where you concentrate entirely on the breath was called Anapana, we were told, and merely preparatory to Vipassana, which was something quite different and more challenging. Only when the mind had been tamed and tied down to the breath crossing the lip, like a dog to a chain, could we progress. That would be the fourth day. I knew I wouldn’t be ready. But on the third evening, towards the end of the last session, something happened. In the midst of the usual fierce pains, with a strange naturalness and inevitability, my consciousness at last fused with my upper lip: the breath, the lip, the mind, these apparently incompatible entities did, in fact, fit together, flow together, were one. I was my lip bathed in soft breath. At once the breathing that had been irregular and forced subsided to a light caress passing back and forth across the skin, a soft rising and falling breathed, not by me it seemed, but by my whole body, by the air outside my body, by everything around me. Then, as if at the touch of a switch, the scalding rigidity tensing thighs and hips dissolved. In a moment, the lower body sank into suppleness. Where there had been formless pain, I became aware of thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet. A strange heat was being forced downward through them. My bare feet were cold but a hot pain was passing out pleasantly through the soles.
The experience could not have been more unexpected. Or more welcome. I was immediately anxious it must end at once, anxious that some malignant thought would rise up to cancel it out. Don’t think, Tim. Do not think! Do not give yourself commands not to think! Silence! I focused on that breath that now seemed so strangely detached from me, or rather that I was just a small part of, as if the boundaries that routinely separated me from the world that was not me had blurred. And after perhaps a minute – but there is no measuring time in these circumstances – like a prisoner released from a yoke, my back, which had been cramped and bent, rose gently upright and was straight. As it did so, I was aware of each of the muscles that quietly lifted it. I felt how natural the erect position was. I felt blessed.
A few moments later and things were back to normal: the pain, the frustration, the waiting for the gong that would bring release.
Surprise Party
ON THE FOURTH day, I wept. It is more embarrassing to talk about this than about my urinary troubles, but to miss it out would be to lose a turning point.
I had got through the two-hour early-morning session. There had been no repeat of the previous evening’s brief beatitude, but a corner had been turned nevertheless, for I discovered that the more I let go, without worrying when each session would end or what I was thinking or feeling, then the less the pain of sitting like this bothered me. Rather, it was now as if this cross-legged pain were helping me to discover a movement of the mind that I had never really made before: unquestioning acceptance, letting go. It had been hard work getting to this point and it was not until I discovered that movement, or rather until it simply happened to me, that I even appreciated it was possible. Words can describe a mental experience, after the event, but had the same words been spoken to me a thousand times before the experience, I would no more have understood them than a child born in the tropics would understand sleet and snow. That gloomy man had been right: the position was not the problem. The problem was in my head.
&nbs
p; So I sat, still in some pain but no longer angry. And the less I was angry the less I was in pain. At times the position began to feel comfortable, even beautiful, the way it invited stillness: the legs locked, the back anchored, the hands quietly joined, and the mind too seemed to have been quietened by the position. Everything came from having accepted that one really was here for the whole five days, from truly not wishing for the time to hurry by, truly not wanting to be back at one’s computer writing it all down.
How right they had been to forbid us pens and paper!
After the morning session, at six thirty, we went to breakfast. We picked up plates, queued at a small table stacked with food, then sat together in silence. I had not expected what a pleasure this would be. The long hours spent wrestling, eyes closed, with wayward thoughts seemed to have heightened our sense of taste. Everybody ate slowly and with relish. A piece of fresh white bread seemed as good as any cake. And each face took on a calm and dignity that made one feel unusually happy to be part of the human race. There was no competition for attention, no flirting or coteries, no exhibitionism, no privileged partnerships. In short, nothing for a story. If you needed milk or water or tea, people understood and offered at once, with a faint smile. Afterwards, each person went to the sink and washed his plate and cup. No wonder they called it the Noble Silence.