The Schopenhauer Cure(51)
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.