The Schopenhauer Cure (21 page)

The routine at the ashram had indeed begun to offer some mind-calming. Her mind fixated less on John, but now Pam was beginning to feel that the insomnia was worse than the obsession. She lay awake listening to the sounds of the night: a background beat of rhythmic breathing and the libretto of snores, moans, and snorts. About every fifteen minutes she was jolted by the shrill sound of a police whistle outside her window.

But why could she not sink into sleep? It
had
to be related to the twelve hours of meditation every day. What else could it be? Yet the 150 other students seemed to be resting comfortably in the arms of Morpheus. If only she could ask Vijay these questions.

Once while furtively looking about for him in the meditation hall, Manil, the attendant who cruised up and down the aisles, poked her with his bamboo rod and commented, "Look inward. Nowhere else." And when she did spot Vijay in the back of the men's section, he seemed entranced, sitting erect in the lotus position, motionless as a Buddha.

He must have noticed her in the meditation hall; of the three hundred, she was the only one sitting Western style in a chair. Though mortified by the chair, she had had such a back ache from days of sitting that she had no choice but to request one from Manil, Goenka's assistant.

Manil, a tall and slender Indian, who worked hard at appearing tranquil, was not pleased with her request. Without removing his gaze from the horizon, he responded, "Your back? What did you do in past lives to bring this about?"

What a disappointment! Manil's answer belied Goenka's vehement claims that his method lay outside the province of any specific religious tradition. Gradually, she was coming to appreciate the yawning chasm between the nontheistic stance of rarified Buddhism and the superstitious beliefs of the masses. Even teaching assistants could not overcome their lust for magic, mystery, and authority.

Once she saw Vijay at the 11A.M. lunch and maneuvered herself into a seat next to him. She heard him take a deep breath, as though inhaling her aroma, but he neither looked at her nor spoke. In fact, no one spoke to anyone; the rule of noble silence reigned supreme.

On the third morning a bizarre episode enlivened the proceedings. During the meditation someone farted loudly and a couple of students giggled. The giggle was contagious, and soon several students were caught up in a giggling jag. Goenka was not amused and immediately, wife in tow, stalked out of the meditation hall. Soon one of the assistants solemnly informed the student body that their teacher had been dishonored and would refuse to continue the course until all offending students left the ashram. A few students picked up and left, but for the next few hours meditation was disturbed by the faces of the exiled appearing at windows and hooting like owls.

No mention was ever made again of the incident, but Pam suspected that there had been a late-night purge since the next morning there were far fewer sitting Buddhas.

Words were permitted only during the noon hour when students with specific questions could address the teacher's assistants. On the fourth day at noon Pam posed her question about insomnia to Manil.

"Not for you to be concerned about," he replied, gazing off into the distance. "The body takes whatever sleep it requires."

"Well then," Pam tried again, "could you tell me why shrill police whistles are being blown outside my window all night long?"

"Forget such questions. Concentrate only upon
anapana-sati.
Just observe your breath. When you have truly applied yourself, such trivial events will no longer be disturbances."

Pam was so bored by the breath meditation that she wondered whether she could possibly last the ten days. Other than the sitting, the only available activity was listening to Goenka's nightly tedious discourses. Goenka, garbed in gleaming white, like all the staff, strove for eloquence but often fell short because an underlying shrill authoritarianism shone through. His lectures consisted of long repetitive tracts extolling the many virtues of Vipassana, which, if practiced correctly, resulted in mental purification, a path to enlightenment, a life of calmness and balance, an eradication of psychosomatic diseases, an elimination of the three causes of all unhappiness: craving, aversion, and ignorance. Regular Vipassana practice was like regular gardening of the mind during which one plucked out impure weeds of thought. Not only that, Goenka pointed out; Vipassana practice was portable, and provided a competitive edge in life: while others whiled away the waiting time at bus stops, the practitioner could industriously yank out a few weeds of cognitive impurity.

The handouts for the Vipassana course were heavy with rules which, on the surface, seemed understandable and reasonable.
But there were so many of them.
No stealing, no killing of any living creature, no lies, no sexual activity, no intoxicants, no sensual entertainment, no writing, note taking, or pens or pencils, or reading, no music or radios, no phones, no luxurious high bedding, no bodily decorations of any sort, no immodest clothing, no eating after midday (except for first-time students who were offered tea and fruit at 5P.M. ). Finally, the students were forbidden to question the teacher's guidance and instructions; they had to agree to observe the discipline and to meditate exactly as told. Only with such an obedient attitude, Goenka said, could students gain enlightenment.

Generally, Pam gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, a dedicated man who had devoted his life to offering Vipassana instruction. Of course he was culture-bound. Who wasn't? And hadn't India always groaned under the weight of religious ritual and rigid social stratification? Besides, Pam loved Goenka's gorgeous voice. Every night she was entranced by his deep sonorous chanting in ancient Pali of sacred Buddhist tracts. She had been moved in similar fashion by early Christian devotional music, especially Byzantine liturgical chants, by the cantors singing in synagogues, and once, in rural Turkey, was transfixed by the hypnotic melodies of the muezzin calling the populace to prayer five times a day.

Though Pam was a dedicated student, it was difficult for her simply to observe her breathing for fifteen straight minutes without drifting off into one of her reveries about John. But gradually changes occurred. The earlier disparate scenarios had coalesced into a single scene: from some news source--either TV, radio, or newspaper--she learned that John's family had been killed in an airplane crash. Again and again she imagined the scene. She was sick of it. But it kept on playing.

As her boredom and restlessness increased, she developed an intense interest in small household projects. When she first registered at the office (and learned to her surprise that there was no fee for the ten-day retreat), she noted small bags of detergent in the ashram shop. On the third day she purchased a bag and thereafter spent considerable time washing and rewashing her clothing, hanging them on the clothesline behind the dormitory (the first clothesline she had seen since childhood), and, at hourly intervals, checking on the drying process. Which bras and which panties were the best dryers? How many hours of night drying were equal to an hour's day drying. Or shade drying versus sun drying? Or hand-wrung clothes versus non-wrung clothes?

On the fourth day came the great event: Goenka began the teaching of Vipassana.

The technique is simple and straightforward. Students are instructed to meditate on their scalp until a sensation occurrs--an itch, a tingle, a burning, perhaps the feeling of a tiny breeze upon the skin of the scalp. Once the sensation is identified, the student is simply to observe, nothing more. Focus on the itch. What is it like? Where does it go? How long does it last? When it disappears (as it always does), the meditator is to move to the next segment of the body, the face, and survey for stimuli like a nostril tickle or an eyelid itch.

After these stimuli grow, ebb, and disappear, the student proceeds to the neck, the shoulders, until every part of the body is observed right down to the soles of the feet and then in reverse direction back up the body to the scalp.

Goenka's evening discourses provided the rationale for the technique. The key concept is
anitya--impermanence.
If one fully appreciates the impermanence of each physical stimulus, it is but a short step to extrapolate the principle of
anitya
to all of life's events and unpleasantries; everything will pass, and one will experience equanimity if one can maintain the observer's stance and simply watch the passing show.

After a couple of days of Vipassana, Pam found the process less onerous as she gained skill and speed at focusing on her bodily sensations. On the seventh day, to her amazement, the whole process slipped into automatic gear and she began "sweeping,"

just as Goenka had predicted. It was as if someone poured a jug of honey on her head which slowly and deliciously spread down to the bottom of her feet. She could feel a stirring, almost sexual hum, like the buzz of bumblebees enveloping her, as the honey flowed down. The hours zipped by. Soon she discarded her chair and melded with the three hundred other acolytes sitting in the lotus position at the feet of Goenka.

The next two days of sweeping were the same, and each passed quickly. On the ninth night she lay awake--she slept as badly as before but was less concerned about it now after learning from one of the other assistants (having given up on Manil), a Burmese woman, that insomnia in the Vipassana workshop is extremely common; apparently, the prolonged meditative states make sleep less necessary. The assistant also cleared up the mystery of the police whistles. In southern India, night watchmen routinely blow whistles as they circle the perimeter of the territory they guard. It is a preventative measure warning off thieves in the same way the little red light on auto dashboards warns car thieves of the presence of an activated auto alarm.

Often the presence of repetitive thoughts is most apparent when they vanish, and it was with a start that Pam realized that she had not thought about John for two entire days.

John had vanished. The entire endless loop of fantasy had been replaced by the honeyed buzz of sweeping. How odd to realize that she now carried around her own pleasure maker which could be trained to secrete feel-good endorphins. Now she understood why people got hooked, why they would go on a lengthy retreat, sometimes months, sometimes years.

Yet now that she had finally cleansed her mind, why was she not elated? On the contrary, a shadow fell upon her success. Something about her enjoyment of "sweeping"

darkened her thoughts. While pondering that conundrum, she dropped off into a light twilight sleep and was aroused a short time later by a strange dream image: a star with little legs, top hat and cane, tap-dancing across the stage of her mind. A dancing star! She knew exactly what that dream image meant. Of all the literary aphorisms that she and John shared and loved, one of her favorites was Nietzsche's phrase from
Zarathustra
: "One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."

Of course. Now she understood the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana.

Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity, tranquility, or, as he often put it,
equipoise.
But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken up Vipassana, would
Lear
or
Hamlet
have been born? Would any of the masterpieces in Western culture have been written? One of Chapman's couplets drifted into mind: No pen can anything eternal write that is not steeped in the humour of the night Steeped in the humour of the night--that was the task of the great writer--to immerse oneself in the humour of the night, to harness the power of darkness for artistic creation. How else could the sublime dark authors--Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Hardy, Camus, Plath, Poe--have illuminated the tragedy lurking in the human condition? Not by removing oneself from life, not by sitting back and observing the passing show.

Even though Goenka proclaimed his teaching was nondenominational, his Buddhism shone through. In his nightly discourse cum sales pitch, Goenka could not restrain himself from stressing that Vipassana was the Buddha's own method of meditation, which he, Goenka, was now reintroducing to the world. She had no objection to that. Though she knew little of Buddhism, she had read an elementary text on the plane to India and had been impressed by the power and truth of the Buddha's four noble truths:

1. Life is suffering.

2. Suffering is caused by attachments (to objects, ideas,

individuals, to survival itself).

3. There is an antidote to suffering: the cessation of desire, of attachment, of the self.

4. There is a specific pathway to a suffering-free existence: the eight-step path to enlightenment.

Now, she reconsidered. As she looked about her, at the entranced acolytes, the tranquilized assistants, the ascetics in their hillside caves content with a life dedicated to Vipassana "sweeping," she wondered whether the four truths were so true after all. Had the Buddha gotten it right? Was the price of the remedy not worse than the disease? At dawn the following morning she lapsed into even greater doubt as she watched the small party of Jainist women walk to the bathhouse. The Jainists took the decree of no killing to absurd degrees: they hobbled down the path in a painfully slow, crablike fashion because they first had to gently sweep the gravel before them lest they step on an insect--indeed they could hardly breathe because of their gauze masks, which prevented the inhalation of any miniscule animal life.

Everywhere she looked, there was renunciation, sacrifice, limitation, and resignation. Whatever happened to life? To joy, expansion, passion, carpe diem?

Was life so anguished that it should be sacrificed for the sake of equanimity? Perhaps the four noble truths were culture-bound. Perhaps they were truths for 2,500 years ago in a land with overwhelming poverty, overcrowding, starvation, disease, class oppression, and lack of any hope for a better future. But were they truths for her now? Didn't Marx have it right? Didn't all religions based on release or a better life hereafter target the poor, the suffering, the enslaved?