A Fortune-Teller Told Me (65 page)

The following hours were not equally wonderful, but as the time passed I no longer waited impatiently for the end. Meditating was no longer a test of endurance, like staying underwater until the lungs burst. It had become what it should be: an exercise in concentration. I had the impression of having “learned” something, like swimming or reading. Now it was up to me. I had put a rein on the beast that was my mind; the question now was in what direction to ride.

I used the midday break to go and meditate at the top of the waterfall. After
anapanaa
, I entered my skin, I lost myself in a cell, and the void opened before me. Golden images came to meet me, faces of people I knew: my mother, my father; then strangers; then beautiful colors. I had arrived!

I still had terrible cramps and difficulties, but now I knew they would pass, I knew I could go back to that door and walk through it. Above all I had understood the great wisdom of John and his method: to arrive at the idea of impermanence, the consciousness of
anicca
, by using the pain induced by immobility. Once one accepted the fact that pain, like everything else, was transitory, the great step was accomplished.

This experience reinforced my theory that our exclusive faith in science had cut us Westerners off from another sphere of awareness, that we had embarked on the high road of scientific knowledge and forgotten all the other paths we had once known. Here was the proof: pain was not merely a physical phenomenon to be controlled with a pill. By
training the mind one could achieve the same result. I thought of Leopold’s remark on the
Nagarose
, that travel makes sense only if you come back with an answer in your baggage. Was this relearning the use of the mind perhaps that answer, the thing that one day I will take back to Europe?

On the final day of the course, the last hour of meditation was given to the practice of “loving kindness.” The idea was that, with the mind calm and purified, one turns toward all other beings to share with them the merits acquired by practice. It was a hymn to love, and John ended it by reading the magnificent words of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: “If I have the eloquence of men and angels, but speak without love, I am like a booming gong or a clashing cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all mysteries, and knowing all things, and if I have the faith to move mountains, but have not love, then I am nothing … Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous, love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, it is not resentful … Love never ends. But the gift of prophecy will come to an end and the gift of languages will not continue for ever. And knowledge, in time, also must fail. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect … When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought like a child, I argued like a child, but now that I am a man, I have put away childish ways … In short, there are three things that endure: faith, hope and love: and the greatest of these is love.”

To this, twenty centuries of thought have added nothing.

Then John recited a long list of people to whom we sent our thanks and a share of the “merits” for having contributed to the course. One of these was a woman who ran some of the most famous massage parlors of Bangkok, who had donated all our vegetarian meals. This too was Thailand!

We were released from our vows and from the Noble Silence. In the evening there would be a dinner—not vegetarian and with wine—to celebrate the end of the retreat and to allow the participants to talk and get to know each other. That was not at all what I wanted! I took my backpack and left.

Dan Reid’s house was an hour and a half by car from Pongyang, and I got there at sunset. Wonderful. It was built entirely of wood in the old Thai style, on the bank of a river, with a wide terrace overlooking the water. Dan studied Chinese at Berkeley, lived fifteen years in Taiwan, learned tai chi chuan and kung fu, and has practiced religions from Taoism to Lamaism. Dan, too, is a man engaged in a search. He is convinced that in the Chinese and Tibetan past lies a wisdom that has been lost, and he uses his deep knowledge of the language as a key to open that forgotten treasure chest. He has written books on the Taoist methods for staying healthy and sexually active, and for achieving long life. Yuki, his wife, also practices Chinese occult sciences, and like Dan she is a great meditator.

Dinner consisted of three different kinds of rice and some tiny boiled cuttlefish. These were the first “beings” I had seen on a plate for some time, and they made me cringe slightly. We talked about gems and stones which, if carried on the person, serve to attract energy and deflect dangers. Yuki said she believed in the dematerialization of certain objects. She told us she had two gold bracelets which a woman had put on her arm when she was small, bending the bones of her hand to force them on. One day she woke up to find that one of those bracelets had vanished. It could not possibly have slipped off. She searched high and low for it, but it was nowhere to be found. The only explanation was that it had dematerialized. It had become energy. Yuki said that the old Chinese legends are full of such tales.

Dan was writing a book on Chinese cooking. He described an evening he had spent in a new restaurant in Canton. The tables were set on three levels around an enormous iron cage containing dogs, snakes, monkeys, bears and other specialties. White-clad cooks would fetch the animal ordered by the customers. Some of the monkeys had no hands, because a client had wanted to eat only the palms. The wound would be cauterized with hot irons and the monkey thrown back in the cage, howling, to wait until another client wanted to eat, for example, its brain. The poor beasts, who knew what was in store for them, would begin screaming like banshees whenever someone in white walked by.

“In the next life,” I said, “in that restaurant the monkeys will be the cooks and the cooks will be the monkeys.”

“Aha, you see,” said Dan, “you’re still a Westerner and a Christian.
You have to believe there is justice in this world. For a Buddhist it’s not like that.” I had to confess that ten days of meditation had not freed me from that desire to settle accounts with “evil.”

I slept on the terrace. I woke at five, lit three sticks of incense in my hosts’ Buddha room, and meditated facing the river for over an hour. I felt healthy, strong, purified. Those ten days of silence, abstinence and effort had sharpened me and ironed out the kinks.

It was January 23, and according to the Chinese calendar there were still two weeks to go before the real end of 1993 and my flightless year. But I felt a strong urge to reassert my Florentine nature, to take my fate into my own hands again and defy that prohibition which had ruled my life for the past thirteen months. At breakfast I announced that I would go back to Bangkok by plane.

“You’re right,” said Yuki. “Today is a highly propitious day for you.” When she got up she had gone to meditate in the Buddha room and had seen my three sticks of incense. From the way the ashes had fallen she had read my future. “You have no problem. Really, no problem,” she kept saying. That pleased me. Did I believe in the message of the ashes, then? Well, why not!

It was Sunday, and without a booking it wasn’t easy to get a seat on a flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. I waited for hours at the airport. At last I was called for flight TG119. A good number? I wondered, as if by habit.

Suddenly everything was normal again: the piped music, the seat belts, the takeoff, the anonymity of the passengers. I shut my eyes, thought of the point where my breath touched the skin, and continued to get to know
anicca
until I felt the wheels touch the runway at Bangkok Airport.

I remembered—the general had said it in one of the sunset sermons—that if one dies while meditating, and in that last moment the mind is still, one will be reborn in a place of great peace and tranquillity.

I missed my chance that time.

“I move throughout the world without a plan, guided by instinct, connecting through trust, and constantly watching for serendipitous opportunities.”

So writes Rita Golden Gelman, who, at the age of forty-eight, left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of connecting with people in cultures all over the world.
Tales of a Female Nomad
encourages us all to dust off our dreams and rediscover the joy, the exuberance, and the hidden spirit that so many of us bury when we become adults.

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