by Will Storr
I don’t know why, but I am rather disheartened to find that Mack had been embraced so wholeheartedly by Vered. Then, just before she closes the door behind me, she says something that will come to resonate for many months to come. ‘I actually will suggest that when you’re ready, you come for another session. Very often I don’t, but I feel with you, we just touched the tip of the iceberg. I got the sense that your subconscious was saying, “Finally someone’s going to acknowledge me! I’ve got things to say, I want to be heard!” It’s like your conscious mind is so analytical, and your subconscious mind is saying, “What about me? I need to be addressed.”’
And as it turns out, Vered Kilstein could not have been more right.
5
‘Solidified, intensified, gross sensations’
A winter night in the Blue Mountains, 140 kilometres west, 1,065 metres above and many degrees of strangeness removed from the glories of Sydney, Australia. When the slow train that winds up the valley finally drops me off, I am surprised to discover that the compound I am heading for is a long hike out of the village of Blackheath. The road is narrow, empty and lined with tall trees that have become a gigantic wall of shifting shadows in the dark. I have never liked the Blue Mountains. Tourists seem to enjoy its views and its tearooms and its rainy, isolated towns, but whenever I have visited, it has always seemed to me to be an uneasy place, of bad memories, freezing mists and general human weirdness. You hear rumours of unkind people taking refuge among its epic forests, of suicides and dying walkers and long-ago massacres of Aboriginal tribes.
This is why, as I shuffle alone and slightly afraid up this unlit path, I am warmly anticipating the glad reception that will no doubt greet me when I arrive at the Vipassana Meditation Centre. Tonight, there is to be a welcome dinner and a get-to-know-you session and tomorrow will begin ten days of soothing and absolute silence. It is to be a retreat during which we will learn what is perhaps the world’s most ancient form of Buddhist meditation. This, it is claimed, is the method perfected by Gotama the Buddha himself more than two and a half thousand years ago. Other varieties serve to focus the mind with the use of counting, mantras or visualisation, but these practices are dismissed by Vipassana teachers as crude ‘concentration techniques’. Vipassana is not concerned with childish ‘blissed-out states’, but with moral and psychological purification. By observing ‘the changing nature of body and mind’ we will perform a ‘deep, deep operation on the brain’ and thereby ‘experience the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness, penetrating ever subtler layers of mind until we reach the source of our misery.’ And when we are done, in about a week and a half’s time, happiness is going to follow us ‘like a shadow.’
Unlike past-life regression, there is plenty of sound evidence for the efficacy of meditation. Like PLR, though, it does come shrink-wrapped with some strange beliefs – about reincarnation, for example, and karma and the universe consisting of thirty-one levels, one of which is inhabited solely by giants. Although it seemed to me that what tangible effects PLR had were likely to be a product of the placebo effect, I would be being unfair to Vered Kilstein if I was to dismiss all of her healing powers as accidental. She was, I thought, an analyst of genuine talent. When, after only a few minutes of talk, she asked me if there exist any wealthy people who have achieved success in honourable ways, I replied, ‘No.’ And in doing so I had revealed myself to hold an implicit belief that is every bit as prejudiced as the ones John Mackay had preached to the mild-mannered gay-haters of Gympie.
I experienced that nauseous, unmoored sensation again. There I had been, blithely assuming that the bigots were everywhere else and it had taken Vered less than ten minutes to demonstrate that I was one as well. Since meeting John Mackay, I have been mapping the wrongness of others, trying to track the trails of their cognitive errors back to some kind of source. But what about my beliefs, my wrongness? Doesn’t the position I hold, with my Dictaphone and my notepad and my ability to always have the last word, depend on operating from a safe position of known sanity? Isn’t that the assumption that I demand from you, the reader? Am I ‘sane’? If so, why is it that when I look back upon my life I all too frequently see the actions of a man who is anything but? It was time, I realised, for some humility and reflection and pause. And that is what I am hoping to find here.
I turn the corner, off the road, and rush through the darkness of the car park towards the welcoming light of the canteen. The room is bare and dirty-white and crammed with trestle tables and men. All between their early twenties and late forties; every ethnicity seems to be represented. There are sporty ones with tracksuits, straight backs and gelled hair; slumping city types fresh from work with their collar buttons undone; solitary, lumpy, middle-aged guys; and an original hippy with orange trousers and a hat that is unnecessarily tall. And there is an atmosphere I wasn’t expecting, too, of tension and of watching.
I walk to the registration desk, where a manager hands me a plastic ziplock bag. ‘Place your wallet and your mobile phone in here.’
I do as he requests. He says, ‘Do you have a mobile phone?’
‘It’s in the bag,’ I reply.
‘No other phones? You are forbidden from having a mobile phone on your person during the course.’
‘It’s in there!’ I say.
He looks at the bag warily, then back at me. He hands me a document, on which I have to provide details of my medical history and mental health and sign an agreement to say that I will abide by the ‘code of discipline’. I brush my eye over it quickly. There is something about remaining silent for the duration of the ten-day course and blah, blah, blah something about not killing anyone.
I sign on the line and wander over to collect my meal. I sit, eyeing my food carefully. I can’t work out exactly what it is – some lentil concoction.
‘First time?’ says the young man of Malaysian appearance sitting next to me.
I nod, forcing down a gobbet of green-grey sludge.
‘Are you nervous?’
‘No!’ I say. ‘Nervous?’
He nods at me, admiringly.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. ‘They say, by day eight you don’t really feel the pain any more. It’s like you’re separate from it.’
I put down my spoon.
‘Pain?’
But his attention has been taken by the arrival of a man at the front, who puts on an audio tape and instructs us all to listen. ‘Apparently,’ my dining partner just has time to add, ‘most people don’t last the first six days.’
From the cassette player, we hear a cold, aristocratic-sounding English voice. ‘You must agree to abide by the code of discipline,’ he says. ‘You must make a decision now that you will remain here for ten days. You must not leave the compound. To leave early could be harmful.’
I glance around at the drab walls, the closed doors, the lentil pot, the drinking urns marked RAINWATER and the sign saying DO NOT FACE THE FEMALE SIDE. There is something about this place … it just doesn’t seem like the blissful haven I was expecting. Vipassana, after all, is supposed to be an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. I look down, worriedly, at the document I have just signed.
‘WHAT VIPASSANA IS NOT: It is not an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life.’
Oh.
I turn the sheet and skim through the code of discipline. ‘The foundation of the practice is sila – moral conduct. Sila provides a basis for the development of Samadhi – the concentration of the mind. Purification of the mind is achieved though panna – the wisdom of insight.’
I note that I have agreed to abstain from killing any living creature, from stealing, from sexual activity, from telling lies and from taking intoxicants. And it is not your standard silence that I will be observing, it is a ‘Noble’ one – which means ‘silence of body, speech and mind. Any form of communication with fellow students, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes etc. is prohibited.’
‘Morning wake-up bell – 4 a.m.’
Oh.
When the tape has finished, we are led through the shadowy compound to a large pagoda, where we kneel in rows on the concrete floor. The lights are low and we are reduced to anonymous, hunched black forms in the gloom. I steal a forbidden glance to my right, where I can make out thirty or so other lumps – presumably, these are the women from whom we are strictly segregated. On a low stage in front of us, a man and a woman are kneeling with closed eyes and perfect stillness, their heads just visible above huge blankets which cover their torsos and folded legs. It takes me a moment to work out what they are, whether they are real.
Once I have settled as best as I can on the dense rectangular cushion provided, a guttural moaning descends from above. It rolls and booms, magical and powerfully sacred, its impossible words petering out into long, drawn-out rumbles. When it is over, the voice – slow, rich, Indian-sounding – compels us to swear that we will stick to our promises (‘I will refrain from sleeping on luxurious, warm, high, cosy beds’) and warns us that we are here to perform a ‘deep, deep operation on the brain.’ ‘This is not about breath control,’ he says. ‘That is a discipline called pranayama. This is the complete opposite.’ He advises us to ‘Work hard, work seriously, work diligently, diligently, diligently.’ Certain ‘weak-minded’ people sometimes ask to leave on day six, he adds, before instructing us to focus all our attention on the sensation of breath entering and leaving our nasal passages. There is no mention of pain, there is only the insinuation of it in my hips and knees and ankles. ‘Resolve to remain for the entire period of the course, no matter what difficulties you may face,’ he orders finally, before slipping into another spooky, primordial chant.
When it is over, it takes me a minute or so to rub the ache from my muscles and joints. I head off, careful not to look at any of the other men, and find my small white room. It contains nothing but some coat hooks and a narrow bed. I don’t feel tired at all. What on earth can a lonely man do to fill a bit of time in a place such as this? I stand there, gazing through the open bathroom door at the roll of tissue paper hanging glumly from its holder in the low blue light.
No. It is forbidden.
I climb into my sleeping bag, zipping it all the way up so that my body is chastely separated from my hands and my right arm is distracted by the torch it is busy shining on some print-outs that I thought to bring with me. I read that this place was opened in 1983, is the second to be founded outside India and can accommodate a hundred and ten students, fifteen hundred of whom have their minds purified annually. The voice that boomed about us from above was that of Vipassana’s brain-excavator-in-chief Mr S. N. Goenka, who was born and raised in Myanmar. Once a wealthy businessman, he found the technique to be so wonderful that he devoted his life to it. Since settling in India in 1969, tens of thousands of people have completed the free courses that they offer at centres in Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, France, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Nepal.
The next thing that I hear is a gong bonging outside my door. It is ten minutes before 4 a.m. I dress haphazardly and shuffle up the dark track towards the pagoda. Aware of other shufflers around me, I keep my head down and my silence noble. Collecting as many cushions and blue blankets as I can carry, I move to my allocated spot on the concrete floor. I lay down a large, thin foam block and put two rectangular ones on top of that and use it as a sort of seat. As I sit, I can feel the pain from last night returning. It settles itself grumpily into my lower back and body as I wait for the teachers to arrive and begin the lesson. Five minutes. Ten minutes. At twelve minutes, I glance furtively around the huge hall. Everyone has their eyes closed. They are sitting straight and still, breathing, concentrating. Oh God. There are no more instructions. We have started. This is it. Between now and lights-out, I realise, I have to spend nearly eleven hours thinking about my nose.
I feel as if I have been bolted inside a coffin. The impossible distances of the hours ahead induce the wooziness of vertigo. Time, petulantly demanding to be filled, turns on me, becoming both gaoler and gaol. The energy that my body has amassed for the day ahead swells, as if from a geyser. There is too much of it. There is nowhere for it to go. I begin to rock very gently back and forth, in the way I used to, to comfort myself when I was a child. I take a series of deep breaths before remembering that, according to Vipassana lore, this is not sufficiently ‘real’ and therefore forbidden. I gird my spine and rearrange my ankles, which have become numb and sore, and try to empty my brain. I sneak a look at my watch.
Three minutes have passed.
Two endless hours later, we are finally released by the sound of a mournful gong. Blinking into the freezing mountain dawn and moving carefully with painful legs, I can make the compound out for the first time. It is a complex of single-storey accommodation blocks linked by dirt paths. The pagoda is on one end, on the other is the canteen, which is set in a beautiful Japanese garden with winter-bare trees and a wooden walkway over a pond that is inhabited by koi and invisibly ribbitting toads. I walk, obediently, with my head down, seeing only passing feet. I am starving.
I lift a tea-towel from a steel tray of toast. Each slice has only vague skid-marks of brown at its edges. I join the queue for the hot stuff and am spooned a ladle of grey porridge. A second helper adds a small dump of tinned prunes. It is a Buddhist breakfast indeed: entirely free of ambition, not desiring approval. I wander into the corner, swallow my food between mouthfuls of rainwater and wonder what I have got myself into. Why did I imagine it would be sensible for me to ‘penetrate ever subtler layers of mind?’ I am the last person … I mean, most of the time, when I think about my unconscious, I picture something angry, struggling to get out of a box.
And then, during the first afternoon session, something extraordinary happens. I catch glimpses of it, I think: hints and implications and strange visions that, I can only suppose, come from the mute parts of my brain – the secret regions that contain the invisible forces that produce belief in God and faith in aliens and the imagined biographies of all those John Lennons. I decide to pay strict attention. And in my struggling to stay awake during the process of going to sleep, I discover that I can watch my conscious mind falling into itself.
When my eyes have been shut for a few moments, my thoughts are just the usual nagging parade of recent memories and worries about the future. Then I start to notice the patterns behind my eyes. The longer I look, the more the monotone smudges take on crystal Technicolor form. Sometimes they appear to reflect what is going on externally; a tickle on my cheek will become a sliding wall of millions of laughing cartoon mouths. At other times they are gloopy, cut-out movies of whatever memory I am replaying. I will see faces from my past, images of places and irrelevant events. My internal monologue warps and switches. At one stage it turns French, saying, ‘Continuez, continuez.’ Then I hear a woman repeating ‘Lamb’s fry’ in a whispering monotone. The breath deepens. I see a dog’s back, a pair of female lips, an ocean wave and I assume this to be the outer atmospheres of the unconscious, because it is at this point that the devils of sleep add their enchanted cornflour and everything thickens into a proper dream. I see the start of a television commercial for a new Ford SUV. It spins on a revolving podium, its unlikely brand-name spelled out in glorious sparkling letters: MIND. My spine relaxes, my jaw sags and I snap awake just in time to save my body collapsing onto the concrete floor. Then I look at my watch – three or four minutes have usually passed – I shuffle my aching legs and begin it all again.
Over the next few days, the contents of these visions begin to worry me. The 4 a.m. wake-ups pull me out of some subterranean phase of sleep so abruptly that I can remember vivid details of my dream. One morning, I am walking in a red-light district when I see a girl who I know and love but who does not love me. ‘I’m a prostitute,’ she says. I ask her hopefully, ‘Does that mean I can sleep with you?’ She looks sor
ry for me, but resigned. ‘I suppose so,’ she sighs. ‘It’s £30.’ During the mediation sessions, at the point just before I dissolve into unconsciousness and bolt myself awake, I begin to see the faces of women that I loved long ago. Sometimes it is a glimpse of a bare shoulder that I haven’t seen for years. Sometimes it is a detail of a face or a length of hair. Sometimes they turn to face me and smile. Always, they make me feel sad.
My first memory of being in love is lying alone in a tent on a hot summer’s day, feeling so scared and sick with dreadful emotion that I couldn’t move. It was during a Scout camp. I was twelve years old and in the teeth of some invisible force that I couldn’t understand. That was the beginning of what I would one day come to think of as my second madness.
*
The pain of Vipassana is not merely one of memory. As the ache of one day builds on top of the next, I begin to find it impossible to kneel upright for more than ten minutes. No matter how carefully I engineer my structure of cushions and blankets, I find no escape: the concrete beneath the padding always punches through. It begins, at the start of a session, as aches in my shins, ankles and the tops of my feet and then spreads and merges to form great tracts of agony, while my back – which, along with my head, must remain straight – hurts in such a way that I keep imagining that it has daggers of wood sticking out of it.
Equally unpleasant is the disorientation of being lost in time. The desperation for the session to end is such that I lose faith in my body-clock. After what seems to be a long period of shuffling and rubbing-away of pain, there always comes a terrible moment when I realise that half an age has passed and I have twice as long to go. And it is still not over, and it is still not over, and it is still not over … I come to hate the sound of the air conditioning shutting off at the beginning of a session, and the resulting silence. I dread it as if it is the closing of a prison door.