The Schopenhauer Cure(52)
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:
Life is suffering.
Suffering is caused by attachments (to objects, ideas, individuals, to survival itself).
There is an antidote to suffering: the cessation of desire, of attachment, of the self.
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?
But, Pam said to herself (after a few days of noble silence she talked to herself a great deal), wasn’t she being an ingrate? Give credit where it was due. Hadn’t Vipassana done its job—calmed the mind and quashed her obsessive thoughts? Hadn’t it succeeded where her own best efforts, and Julius’s, and the group members’ efforts had all failed? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Perhaps it was not a fair comparison. After all, Julius had put in a total of about eight group sessions—twelve hours—while Vipassana demanded hundreds of hours—ten full days plus the time, and effort, to travel halfway around the world. What might have happened if Julius and the group had worked on her that many hours?
Pam’s growing cynicism interfered with meditation. The sweeping stopped. Where had it gone—that delicious, mellifluous, buzzing contentment? Each new day her meditative practice regressed. The Vipassana meditation progressed no farther than her scalp. Those tiny itches, previously so fleeting, persisted and grew more robust—itches evolved into pinpricks, then into a sustained burning that could not be meditated away.
Even the early work in anapana-sati was undone. The dike of calmness built by breath meditation crumbled, and the surf of unruly thoughts, of her husband, John, or revenge and airplane crashes, came breaking through. Well, let them come. She saw Earl for what he was—an aging child, his large lips pursed and lunging for any nipple within range. And John—poor, effete, pusillanimous John, still unwilling to grasp that there can be no yes without a no. And Vijay, too, who chose to sacrifice life, novelty, adventure, friendship upon the altar of the great God, Equanimity. Use the right word for the whole bunch, Pam thought. Cowards. Moral cowards. None of them deserved her. Flush them away. Now there was a powerful image: all the men, John, Earl, Vijay, standing in a giant toilet bowl, their hands raised imploringly, their squeals for help barely audible over the roar of the flushing water! That was an image worth meditating upon.
19
* * *
The flower replied: You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.
* * *
Bonnie opened the next meeting with an apology. “Sorry to one and all about my exit last week. I shouldn’t have done that but…I don’t know…it was out of my control.”
“The devil made you do it.” Tony smirked.
“Funny. Funny, Tony. Okay, I know what you want. I chose to do it because I was pissed. That better?”
Tony smiled and gave her the thumbs-up signal.
In the gentle voice he always used when addressing any of the women in the group, Gill said to Bonnie, “Last week after you left, Julius suggested you might have felt pissed at being ignored here—that basically the group replayed your description of what routinely happened to you in your childhood.”
“Pretty accurate. Except I wasn’t pissed. Hurt is a better term.”
“I know pissed,” said Rebecca, “and you were good ‘n’ pissed at me.”
Bonnie’s face clouded over as she turned to Rebecca. “Last week you said that Philip had clarified the reason you don’t have girlfriends. But I don’t buy that. Envy of your good looks is not the reason you don’t have girlfriends or at least why you and I haven’t become close; the real reason is that you’re basically not interested in women—or at least you’re not interested in me. Whenever you say something to me in the group, it is always to bring the discussion back to you.”