Saved by the gong

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That's it. The last gong has gonged and I returned to real life after 10 days of vipassana. Such sweet golden sound... (though probably even the honking of a truck would have sounded lovely had it symboled the end of meditation sessions).

All in all it was a very interesting experience, though it definitely wasn't life changing (one important thing I learned is that an hour is alot of time and that two hours is even more). I tried to think how to describe the atmosphere in the course, what it is most similar to in the outside world, and I came to the conclusion that it most resembles a group of hattifatteners (for those of you who haven't read Moomin books - go read them!). Everyone walks around expressionless (though after a couple of days a number of us started to crack and smiled at each other). They don't even seem to walk, they glide around the grounds. And when the gong sounds everyone is drawn to it silently like the hattifatteners are drawn to their barometer. Despite this apparent lack of communication I noticed that people always find some form of communication. We couldn't talk, look or gesture, but that didn't stop the communication, it just became based on subtler things. You learn to recognize when someone wants to say thank you or sorry by the way her breath changes, because yours changes in a similar way. Or if you want to show something to someone you just look at it for a moment longer than you ordinarily would, and then when you leaves she comes to see what it is.

The first couple of days are quite hard in a couple of ways. You spend these days only focusing on your breath so you have no idea how much time passes. I tried estimating my tpm (thoughts per minute) but I was always sure it was time for the meditation to end alot before it actually ended. In the next days you learn the vipassana technique, and luckily it's much easier to estimate your vph (vipassanas per hour) than your tpm. It's also quite hard physically - I asked for more and more pillows, tried to copy every posture I saw someone sitting in, and finally, on the fourth day, moved to sit next to a wall (except for one hour three times a day). And, in addition, it can be just plain boring. I was lucky though, because I had a bit of a cold (I only had a runny nose, nothing else - I think it wasn't a real cold but my body's way of warning me that if I was too mean to it, it could very easily get back at me). This turned the focusing on the breath to something much more interesting - sometimes I breathed through the left nostril, sometimes through the right, it was very diverse. I was also lucky to have had plenty of practice in passing time during some of the courses I took in the university. I think during these days I at least got better at focusing on my breath, my mind started wandering a bit less. But if the main goal is to practice focusing on one thing I don't know why I couldn't just focus on the famous mantra 'when will this end?', I think I could have focused on that quite easily. The one thing that kept me going was the chai. You're supposed to get rid of your cravings, but I feel I just became addicted to chai. I would reach the meals feeling like a zombie and start getting revived as the chai started flowing through my veins (I think I literally had chai, not blood, flowing in my veins - I drank 4 full cups of it every day).

One of the things that I felt were reassuring is that you could sense that we were all going through similar things. During the meditations that followed a breakfast I thought was terrible I heard alot of rumbling from people's stomachs (on the same day, which was also the hardest for me, we got stale bread for dinner, I nearly cried!). And we all seemed to leave the meditation hall to walk around or meditate in our rooms at the same times (though usually we stayed in the hall). It was also nice to do the meditation in the forest. To learn about impermanence they could have just let us look at the same place in the forest at different times. Every time I sat in my favorite spot something else was going on there (monkeys, butterflies, a crow picking sticks for a nest and many more). You start noticing the small things, like how monkeys make many different types of noises and how many different types of moths there are.

I thought that when I'd return my blog describing the events of the past two weeks would be something like:
Day 1: I meditated, ate and slept
Day 2: I meditated, ate and slept
...

But there were actually a number of interesting events:
Day 3: There was a scorpion in the meditation hall.
Day 4: There were two huge spiders in our meditation hall (after this I stopped counting spiders and scorpions as events).
Day 5: I noticed the monkeys going completely crazy around one room which is sort of separated from the others. I checked and found out they had entered this room! In the days afterwards I saw that they didn't fix the hole the monkeys made and that they kept entering. At the end of the course I found out that the girl living there told them she liked living with the monkeys!
Day 6: A number of us left the meditation early and were sitting in the same area when a group of monkeys came and joined us. One of them jumped up on the water tank and tried to open it. He couldn't because there was a rock on it. He looked at the rock, tried to open the tank again and then threw the rock off and started drinking our water.
Day 7: I have no idea what actually happened but there was a huge commotion outside during meditation. There were alot of sounds of monkeys going crazy and the sounds of two animals that sounded like wild pigs (though they might have come from the snoring indian guy who took the course with us).
Day 9: Some monkeys stole a girl's laundry bag (it turns out they like the color red) and ran up a tree (for the first time I noticed the trees were really high) while a number of girls waved sticks at them from the bottom and yelled at them silently to give it back. (The laundry bag is still hanging up there on the tree)

Looking back these events don't seem very exciting, but at the time they were great entertainment (especially since the only other entertainment you have is watching a video of the teacher, and indian-vipassana-meditator-arik-sharon, giving instructions).

And that's it, I returned to the outside world, where there are so many decisions to make. It's suddenly very hard to make decisions, even the smallest ones, after having such a strict routine that I even went to the bathroon according to schedule, and not when I had to go.

My main tip for those who are thinking of doing vipassana - choose the last song you hear or sing before the vipassana very wisely. We had a shabbat dinner and I ended up singing malachei hashalom for three days...

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Comments

[Geir (Gerhardt) Smith]

Hi Ayab,
You did a Vipassana retreat but Dharamsala is the Buddhism of Tibet not Vipassana which is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma f.ex. which don't have any Tantrism in them. Are you interested in them ? It's like you ate German food in Paris. Vipassana is not what Tibetans do. Get it ? Just a question there. I know about Tibetan culture, I studied for five years in Tibetan field at Paris Uni. Speak Tibetan...Four trips to Dharamsala. Thirty five years as a Buddhist. ..etc.. Three years in India and Nepal and so forth. Good tips to pass on here. All the best. Geir.