The first thing to say is that it was deeply uncomfortable.

And unsurprisingly so. The course itself consists of a rather draconian set of precepts and practices, which — were they not signed on to voluntarily — might even be considered torturous. The day begins at 4am, and goes until 9:30pm. In between is a meditation schedule comprised of group sits (all students meditate together in the main hall), individual unsupervised meditation, question-asking-opportunities, and meal breaks. Three simple vegetarian meals are provided per day, although old students are encouraged to refrain from eating after 12-noon, and dinner for new students is usually just a piece of fruit and some tea. Each evening there is a 90-minute video lecture (taped in 1991!) given by S.N.Goenka, Vipassana’s charismatic, chubby-cheeked, favourite-uncle-esque teacher.

Every student, before applying to the course, is required to read and agree to the Vipassana “Code of Discipline”, a rather ominous several page contract which outlines the above stipulations and adds a few more. For the duration of the 10-day course, there is no internet, no books, no writing materials, no phones, no intoxicants, no sexual activity, and — what is maybe most difficult — no talking to other students. ‘Noble silence’, according to the Code of Discipline, means complete “silence of body, speech, and mind”, and any attempts to communicate with other students “whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, etc.” is strictly prohibited. This means that for the duration of the 10-day course, a student exists in simulated, voluntary solitude; tremendously boring, and very uncomfortable.

But only uncomfortable — for me it was not unbearable, or excruciating, or “blissfully” painful, it was simply uncomfortable. And part of the learnings of a program like this are to come into contact with discomfort and to in turn find ways to interact with it. For example, two of my favourite phrases from the teachings were “Let me see how long this lasts”, and “This too shall pass” — they make soundbites out of what it means to be calm, relaxed, level-headed, or “equanimous” as the course-teacher Goenka loves to say.

The final logistic point to mention is that Dhamma.org as an organization is _incredibly_ cool! The Vipassana courses they offer are totally free (including accommodation and food) and are offered in centres all over the world. To preserve the purity of the product, all courses are financed entirely by the donations of former students who have taken at least one 10-day course. If an organization were trying to convince you that it had a social conscience and the best of intentions, it would be difficult to do better than Dhamma.

Physical Discomfort

The most direct form of discomfort is physical. Each student is given, in his/her meditation space, a 2ft x 2ft square mat, and some cushions for support — some older students also opt for extra back support or sometimes sit in chairs. Sitting in this space, usually for hours at a time, several times a day takes its toll on the body. I found that once my willpower faded, my back was more than happy to round downwards and creak with pain, and I was in constant battle to re-straighten it. Furthermore, the mechanics of my inflexible body mean that when sitting in a ‘comfortable cross legged position’ my left ankle was awkwardly supinated under the weight of my right thigh, and so the outside bony part of my ankle was pressed firmly into the ground. Within 10 minutes of sitting like this, I usually found that my left leg, starting in the toes and working towards the hip, gradually became more and more numb.

I would — if this situation ever came up in regular life — just uncross my legs and shift to a different position, but in the depths of meditation the encouraged response to this discomfort is to observe without reacting: “Let me see how long this lasts”, “This too shall pass”. The underlying lesson being that even though my back and legs are in pain at the moment, at some point in the future I will stand up, shake them off, and continue on with my day with little memory of this moment — the discomfort won’t exist forever.

The physical discomfort is a playpen metaphor for many of the other pains and difficulties we might face in life: trauma, anguish, loss, grief, love, distance, uncertainty, hesitation, sadness.

But these macroscopic events — pain in the knees, numbness — do not paint the full picture. Vipassana also teaches students to become acutely aware of sensations as they appear on the body, and also to refrain from reacting to them and instead to just observe. Sitting perfectly still for long periods of time enabled me to feel all kinds of micro-sensations on the surface of my skin — the itch on my nose I am not allowed to scratch, the feeling of ants crawling up my back I am not allowed to wriggle from, the buzzing virtual mosquito on my neck I am not allowed to swat. These physical micro-sensations — much like mental thoughts and feelings — would pop up all the time screaming for attention, and when they saw they were not being attended to, would fade away.

Mental Boredom

The physical tale is one thing, but much more interesting for me was the mental aspect. In the absence of external stimulation, a student is forced to become their own entertainment — for me, this meant realizing just how dull and uninteresting my own thoughts actually are.

During the first few days of sitting eyes-closed, my thoughtstream was a ‘business as usual’ medley. I thought about the days just gone by, I made to-do lists for things I’d like to do, I had pangs of creative energy, moments of quiet reflection, nostalgic reminiscence, curiosity about what friends might be up to, occasional angst, coupled with laughter as jokes and funny moments were remembered. But after about 3 days of this, I found the lack of variety to be stifling. The same people would show up time and again, the same ideas would show up in different guises. The feeling of excitement about ‘some idea’ felt too familiar, and too close to the return to baseline that would inevitably follow. Mental exercises — count slowly to 1000, visualize an icosahedron spinning, navigate along some familiar route — also proved fruitless. They were all just so phenomenally boring. If I were the curator of my own gallery, I would not pay to go and see it.

And this made me realize just how much we, in modern society rely on external entertainment, and how uncomfortable it is to “be alone with one’s thoughts”. In ordinary life, I have never been unstimulated for long enough to experience the intense discomfort that arises from being bored to one’s core. In fact, I suspect that because entertainment is so widespread, I usually pacify myself instinctively just as the first ticklings of discomfort arrive.

But after about Day 4 of this something changed, and it was as though I had rounded a hilltop. I stopped trying to ‘be entertained’ by my thoughts and became more adept at taking Goenka’s advice: “just observe, don’t react”, “let me see how long this lasts”, “this too shall pass”. I became more and more able to exist outside of my thoughts, and to watch them passing one after another. The point of interest moved from being the thoughts themselves to _patterns_ of thought, or _tendencies_ of the mind. I could start formulating mental statements of the kind: “Isn’t it interesting that this is the 3rd time I’ve thought about so-and-so today”, or “I’ve been feeling angry/annoyed/excited/pleased for 15 minutes now”. Vipassana for me therefore, served as an interesting new tool for introspection. It helped me to better ask and answer the question: “How am I doing?” but moreso than other tools, it also emphasised directly why that question is so important — because often we have less control over our streams of thoughts and emotions than we believe we do.

Paying attention to this stream of thoughts also taught me something else. My thoughtstream was sporadic, uncontrolled, unpredictable, wispy, jumpy, and distracted. As I watched my mind jump from thought, to thought, to thought, I realized that the natural state of my mind is not focus, but boredom. The experience reinforced a belief I already hold — that is difficult to do _anything_ for a long period of time (if you do not believe me then try taking a hundred deep breaths in a row). All too often, when working on an essay, or failing to read a book, or completing a problem set in college, I assumed that a lack of focus was caused by the material, or the environment, or my own tiredness. Those factors likely contribute, but meditation showed me that I was capable of being distracted even if there was nothing to be distracted by. That a lack of focus is not some obscure edge-case, it is the default. Maybe this truth is something we all already know (attention spans and goldfish) but witnessing it happen to the degree it did was profound.

Layers of Consciousness

The “thoughtstream” model is also useful as a metaphor because it helps to visualize what I call the separate layers of consciousness. I noticed, for example, that in addition to having a thought-stream, I also have an emotions-stream, and a physical-state-stream. And that although often the streams are intertwined such that a scary thought might make me feel afraid, or tiredness might make me feel cranky, quite often the streams were running in parallel, completely disconnected from one another. This observation was made possible because over the course of a 10-day meditation it is likely to have the same thought crop up multiple times over the course of many days, and for the thought to manifest in different ways each time. For example, there were multiple times during the course where I thought about my future travel to India, and I was amazed as the ease with which I oscillated between outrageous enthusiasm for that plan and outright pessimism and fear that it is a terrible idea. The interesting thing for me is that how I felt about the idea of going to India was completely independent from my ‘thinking’ stream, and very closely coupled to my ‘feeling’ stream. In regular life, I think we all too often tie together the content of our thoughts with their emotional weight, when I saw this to be far from the truth. It is possible to think “Going to India is a terrible idea”, and for that to be a statement that is 100% not about India, and 100% about how I’m feeling (physically or emotionally) at the time. And the same lessons of change and permanence from the above apply here also: “This too shall pass”, “Let me see how long this lasts” — it is possible to think “Going to India is a terrible idea” in one moment, and for that thought to be rendered completely irrelevant by a superseding thought in the next moment. This realization was quite a breakthrough for me, and importantly it redefines what I understand “awareness” to be by introducing several new axes for consideration.

Lack of Control

Before going in to the course, I thought it would be a great time to reflect. I had heard before about meditation being about ‘clearing the mind’ and before the course started I thought of a clear mind as being a great, white drawing board, clear from the clutter of a regular workstation. So, naturally, I had prepared a hefty file of all the things I had been meaning to think about but had not quite gotten around to — graduation, thesis, projects I had worked on, relationships that needed mending. But when I sat down and got down to work, I realized that all those prior plans must go out the window. In the act of meditation itself, I had almost no control over what to think about and what not think about. Thoughts would enter uninvited, and leave of their own accord. I could only sit and watch.

The Personhood of Others — The Social consequences of Noble Silence

One of the smaller effects of Noble Silence is how it served to dehumanized the other people around me — to make them much more like furniture than other sentient beings. We were encouraged to avoid eye-contact, gesture or any form of communication with the other students, and to behave as though alone on the course. When queueing for meals, there is no need to offer polite thank yous when someone lets you in front of them in line. There is no need to engage in small talk or to feign interest in some stranger’s weekend hobby. In many ways, this is relaxing. There is also some joy in knowing that other people were unable to react to my behaviours also — there is no fear of judgement, no worry about inadvertently offending someone or making a social faux pas, because there can be no social repercussions. During the course, my roommate left after day 4 and in the act of leaving opened his mouth to tell me he was going to leave. This felt sacrilegious — as though some deep bond of reciprocal trust had been broken. On the final day, when everyone is allowed to talk to one another, suddenly all these pieces of furniture are brought to life — and that was energizing for a different set of reasons. Like being on a subway train and suddenly knowing the stories of all the people on board.

Scepticism

Talk of meditation usually leaves me very sceptical. All too often people talk about meditation with overly floral language and reference abstract, esoteric, transcendental spirits or concepts which I am easily turned off by. In fact, I would wager that it is exceptionally difficult to use words like ‘meditation’, ‘spiritual’, ‘harmony’, ‘chakra’, ‘mindfulness’ without sounding pompous. The entire practice is wrapped up in this idea of self-improvement and therefore also arrogance. I am always tempted to rebut with challenges — “Well if this experience was so great, then why aren’t you?”; “If meditation is so beneficial then why do you need to describe its benefits in such bumbling language. Why can you not do as the scientists do and simply point to giant power generators, and railroads, and flying machines?”. Those with decent bullshit reflex are understandably sceptical of false godmen and self-help tricks. I hope in the above paragraphs, I’ve done a good job of explaining the details of why I found the Vipassana process to be helpful.

I do though also have some more serious qualms. Firstly, I don’t fully understand the reasons for vipassana’s obsession with that which is ‘temporary/changing’ versus that which is ‘eternal’. So what if something is not “eternal”, why can it not also have meaning and value? The enlightened person, as I understand it, has come to realized that everything is temporary, everything is changing, and therefore is able to make peace with everything. For me, I don’t mind if a sensation, or a thought, or a feeling is impermanent or fleeting, that doesn’t mean it is any less important than one that lingers longer.

The second criticism is that of inaction. It really does seem to me that Vipassana is first and foremost a philosophy of inaction. Goenka addresses this qualm in one of his lectures, where he argues that the Vipassana philosophy is not against action, but against _RE_action. But for me, this response is mere lip service. There is a tremendous amount of attention paid in Vipassana to how to avoid reaction, but very little is offered in terms of how to move forward, make decisions and be proactive. This is further evidenced by the frequency with which Vipassana addresses itself to those who are “boiling over with anger”, or are in great despair. I agree, that for those people it helps to be more level-headed, but I do not consider myself to be one of those people. If anything, I am far too often unemotional when a situation warrants force, or else hesitant when a situation warrants action. For someone like me then, the vanilla form of Vipassana is not enough — it must be supplemented.

Take Aways?

For me the highest and lowest points of the experience lived right beside one another. These climactic moments came on perhaps Day 6. During a group sit, I steeled myself to sit in the slightly uncomfortable cross-legged, left-leg-numbing position for the entire 60 minutes — I had only managed 20 minutes before then. I pushed through, and by the end of that session I had immense pain running all down my left leg, there was numbness all over — my legs had molted and felt as though they were set in plaster. I slowly dragged myself away from my pillow, windshield-wipered my feet, massaged my thighs, and cracked my knees out of their calcified positions, before cursing my hips for being so damn inflexible — I was enraged. This intense emotional burst lasted for about ten minutes, and then I finally sat down in a chair outside in the sun and stayed there for almost thirty. Here I realized that I was not upset because I was in physical pain, I was upset because of a stew of different reasons — I didn’t like being trapped in this place, I didn’t like being trapped in my own head, I was bored, I was exhausted, I hadn’t slept properly, I hadn’t been eating enough, I wanted to go home. The realization was that somehow, all of this energy had been channeled in to a single thought: “why is my left hip so FUCKING inflexible!”. This was a moment of bliss for me — it demonstrated to me that quite often in life we can channel our emotional energies into a few small, understandable targets as proxy for the vast, complicated mess of thoughts, emotions and sensations that are actually occurring. I hope to be more more mindful of this in future.