Dear All,
There comes a time in everyone's lives when we must re-evaluate the path we have chosen. It is said that one's so-called "chosen" path is the result of incomplete knowledge and, unless one has the chance to step outside his life to fully evaluate the circumstances before committing, he will ultimately end up missing the true meaning of his life and feel unfulfilled. So was said to me during my meditation retreat, and as a result of my Guru's guidance, I have decided to re-plot my path fully. Next week I will follow him to his mountain ashram where I will permanently part with all of my belongings (clothes, electronic devices, even the money left in my bank account) in order to gain full acceptance into his noble Society of Samadhi. By casting away all my savings, I can more fully immerse myself in His teachings and, given proper guidance and discipline, eventually come closer and possibly return to The Source. Discipline will be intense, food will be scarce, and complete silence will be maintained. Only time and dedication will tell, but during this time I must have no outside contact or attachments to anyone I've known. To make my transformation complete, I must maintain my separation from the world I've known for many years, possibly decades, following this point.

For this reason I must bid a final farewell to all of you, as I will probably not be seeing any of you ever again. Those of you that I will see again will find me a new and changed person, but even that won't be for many, many years. I've already send my letter of declention to USC, forfeiting the position in the entering class of 2006 that I've fought so hard for, but I know it's for a noble cause. I've changed my life, and I feel fantastic. I thank you all for your continued support during my life up to this point. I offer you the following description of my past two weeks as a narrative of how I achieved my current position, and after this post you won't be hearing from me any longer. Again, thanks for your continued support and take care of my former world while I'm gone. Namaste.









OK, happy april fool's day. I couldn't help it. I know that's what some of you were half-expecting to hear at some point, so there you had it. I'm still going to med school, I still have my money, I haven't succumbed to any brainwashing (yet), and this long pause is due to my 17 day trek.

But I did have this half-crazy experience at this meditation camp if you want to hear about it. The coolest part of this experience is that all of you can easily experience the same thing. There are meditation centers all round the US that offer exactly the same course, for free. www.dhamma.org will tell you a little about it, but if you want to hear a more detailed account, keep reading. It's the longest post I'll ever have, but most of its length is on purpose to try to convey the sense of intense boredom for those 10 days. Like the analogy to India I love take so much to heart, my meditation experience was like a giant lump of shit with a few diamonds mixed in that are worth diving for. Also, since I'll be out of contact 'till mid-April, I thought I'd give you something long to chew on. It gets really cool around Day 7, if you want to read ahead, but for it all to make sense it'd be best to stick through the boring bits. That's what I had to do, so I'm passing it on. Just warning you now.

So maybe it was a bit of an overreaction to shave my ead and enter Buddhism school because of a hangover, but I was really pissed off and it wasn't just the $12. I guess I just finally realized had been wasting my time for too long and it's time to do what I really came out here to do. And besides, if it had been my intention to ever pay for sex, it was $12! That's like two girls in Vietnam, or four in Cambodia.

The experience unfolded much like an acid trip: decision to commit, then boredom, then more boredom so you get pissed off that you wasted your time on it, then anxiety, confusion, and finally experience followed by introspection. So here it is, my extended psychedelic experience, detailed chronologically:

My experience of Vipassana camp:

Day 0:
I found myself on a crowded bus full of backpacks and Nepalis, with about twice as many seats as there should be so that I had about 5 inches of leg room for the bumpy 1-hour journey that would take us the 15km straight up a hill overlooking the Kathmandu valley. I had no idea what to expect, other than people I've met traveling have told me to do it. I understood the precepts, as Lev pointed out, that there would be no talking, no eating after midday, men an women would be separated, no comforts, and no sexual activity (yes, that includes shaking too many times after peeing). Other than that, I figured I'd be sitting on a temple floor for 10 days, that was about all I knew.

The bus ride gave me a pain in my knees that I would come to regard as a relative tickle to the pain I'd get later. I get out and they show me to my room, which luckily I get to myself because they only had 38 people to fit 100 spots. Usually they keep everybody in dorms to help enforce the no jerkoff rule, but they said I'd meditate better with my own room. I originally laughed at the idea but I guess they were right in the end.

The place consists of a few acres of land, mostly covered with buildings with tiny garden paths in between, up the hill overlooking Kathmandu. I say overlooking, but the city was usually blanketed a cloud of thick pollution so that the only time I could actually see any of it was after a rain, even though it was less than 10km away. For 700k people, they sure know how to pollute.

The first thing that struck me was how local the population was. Who am I kidding? I couldn't tell if they were Nepali, Indian, Paki, or Tibetan, and they had about the same racial distribution of NYU. Some dark, some not so dark, some Koreans for some reason, and overall the racial distribution of the crowd reminded me of my premed classes. Still, I expected a course full of hippies for some reason, but these guys looked like any old group pulled off the street. Businessmen, students, loafers, everybody. There were two westerners there, one fat British guy whose double chin gave him that same "either depressed or hopelessly apathetic to the world around him" look that Keith from The Office had. The other guy was this german guy with a completely shaved head except for a Hare Krishna pony tail growing out of a circle in the back, which he said he did "just for fun," not for any religious sense. Luckily I met him before we had to stop talking for 10 days, otherwise I would have had quite an interesting impression of him. The story ends with me going trekking with him. There I spoiled it.

Eventualy one of the happy smiling servants (eventually referred to as the bowing happy slavedrivers) informed me I was "requested" to have tea in the dining hall. I followed the German pseudo-Krishna, who had done the course at that location 9 years ago, to the dining hall and had some of the best tea of my life. This hot milk tea, which was traditional Nepali tea that everybody else had come to despise years ago, saved my sanity later on.

Unfortunately during this tea and subsequent meal, I made friends with this German guy and another Nepali I had met waiting for the bus earlier. I call it unfortunate because it's really a lot harder to not talk to someone if you know them, and once the silence began, I'd feel awkward whenever I was near.

We were led into a large hall where the head guru gave us the run-down of the rules. He was an old man, covered in blankets and a Nepali hat (looks like a Russian pointed hat) who sounded as though he were reading from queue cards. No empathy, just a harsh cold voice. I'll say more about him later, but for a while I was worried that he'd be the one conducting the sessions.

At the end of the run-down he gave us the ultimatum that we could leave now. If we chose to stay past 8PM, we'd be locked in for the full ten days. There would be no escape after that point. I considered it for a while, then realized there'd be no transportation back to town anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

At 8PM, The Gong was rung and "Noble Silence" began. I followed the crowd, half of whom had attended the course before and knew what they were doing, to the main meditation hall, where I was given a square pillow that would be my space for the whole time. I sat down, waited with eyes closed for a little while, and started getting worried that that was all I'd be doing from that point on.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the WIERDEST chanting I'd ever heard. The tone was poorly maintained, there were only about three different notes, and at the end of every phrase he would drop his voice to a crawling throat growl that you'd only hear because the micrphone was so close to his throat. I couldn't help but crack up at the sound of it, but then he stopped chanting and told us we were going to learn the art of Annapana. After a group chanting (a formal request to Someone to learn this form of meditation), he gave instructions in Hindi and then English to focus intently on our respiration by observing nothing but the air coming through the nose. We were by no means to change our natural breath, just to be aware of its natural course and all of its sensations within the nose. So I tried. At 9PM we were told to go to sleep.

Day 1:
The Gong sounded loudly and persistently for 10 minutes at 4AM. It was a pleasant sound, more like the ringing of a clear bell than a gong, but any persistant banging like that at 4AM would be enough to wake even me. At 430 came another bell calling us to the hall. It was cold. Ass cold. I put on my thermal top and bottom, jeans, long sleeve shirt sweater, jacket and hat and even wrapped my towel around myself and was still freezing when I got to the hall. They said nothing for almost 2 hours as we sat there shivering, not allowed to do anything. So, I tried doing what the teacher told me, closed my eyes, and tried focusing all my attention on my respiration. Just the part coming through my nose. Without changing my breathing at all, and above all, without thinking about anything else. This is hard to do. I mean really hard to do. Try it. Really, try it. Right now...

Really. Breathing. Nose. Now....









How long did you last before you started thinking about food, or music, or what else was in this blog, or if your boss is looking over your shoulder, or what you did last night? Or how long before you started breathing heavily or shallowly? I quickly learned that, probably because of all the booze but more likely all the TV and Hamburgers I'd been exposed to in the past 20 years, I couldn't hold my attention more than a second or two before wandering off. My attention span was pathetic, and we were supposed to do this for 2 hours? Rediculous. So I did my best, rediverting my attention over an over again in an endless attempt to learn to concentrate for more than 5 seconds at a time. It was impossible.

Worse than that, I'd work for about 5 minutes, then realize my leg had fallen asleep, then stretch and come back to realize my back was full of knots, or wasnt straight, and by the time I finished stretching my legs and cracking my back, I had been thinking about everybody back home or something I was going to do when I got back or something I had done before. Anything but meditating.

Somehow, 2 hours had gone by and the gong rang again. I followed the crowd out to the dining hall for breakfast. Rice porridge with a small cup of bean soup, all served in metal dishes. The tea, again, was fantastic. We got a break for an hour and a half where I went back immediately and took a nap, then at 8 we were called back for meditation.

The whole group moved in complete silence with their heads down the whole time. We were not even allowed to make any kind of eye contact. All forms of communication were prohibited. Actually, when I first got there I was really excited about this prospect. I'd realized that, in 4 months of traveling, that I had the obligation to engage every Westerner I'd see in some sort of conversation, and if I didn't do it they probably would. When I came back to Thailand, I found I was the quiet, "over it" type of traveler and couldn't stand making those same conversations I'd had thousands of times by then. What's your name? Where are you from? How long have you been traveling? Where have you been? Wow, that's great. Where are you going to go next? I've heard and asked those questions so many times it made me sick. Now, finally, I was going to get my 10 days of peace and quiet.
So I sat again in the meditation hall. This time, however, that wierd chanting appeared again and we were given the same instructions, in a soothing, relaxing, new-agey meditative form but without tacky music in the background, to observe respiration through the nose. Which part of the nose is the breath coming through? Left nostril? Right nostril? Both? Was it hard or shallow, hollow or soft? After about 30 minutes of this instruction, we were to meditate 'till 11 with one 5 minute break in between.

For this whole time I felt pretty cool, actually. Not so much that I was getting any kind of results or confidence in meditation, but more that I kept seeing myself meditating and thinking how cool it was to be involved in a 10-day meditation course. After this, I thought, I'd use this method to increase my concentration every morning before going to classes and I'd be such a great student. And I'd be able to concentrate for long periods, and math would be fun, and I'd never be bored waiting in line again because I'd always have something to do. Then I'd realize I'd been daydreaming for the past half hour and I'd been thinking about such a superior concentration precisely as a result of my aweful concentration, so I'd return to thinking of my respiration for another 5 seconds until my mind would wander again. Probably 95% of that day, apart from the time under instruction, was spent daydreaming. The other 5% was just trying to concentrate, a small fraction of that was actual concentration.

The lunch bell rang at 11 and we were served this giant mountain of rice with four differenet scoops of cooked veggies, two tortillas and a small cup of bean soup. This would be the last meal of the day for the old students, but I would get fruit and more milk tea at 5. These meals were to vary slightly for the rest of my time, but not by much. Nevertheless, the cafeteria would come to be one of the defining parts of the experience, I'll go into this later.

For now let's just say I spent the day in this state of content daydreaming, in one sense happy to be there and in another sense frustrated at my lack of attention. Worse than that, the pain of sitting there was steadily getting worse. The knots in my back had multiplied and I if my foot wasn't alseep, my knees were in bitter agony. Somehow I made it through the 1:00-5:00 meditaiton session fueled by memories of college. I got my fruit, had my hour break, then got called back to meditation at 6. It was a long day. It was a really long day. I mean, just sitting there thinking about stuff or trying to focus on one thing for a long period of time was so grueling. At 7:00, we were called to sit in on an hour long videotaped discourse by our teacher, S.N. Goenka, who should probably be introduced at this point:

S.N.Goenka: He is Mr. Vipassana, the guy to start this current Vipassana movement, busy teaching every single class that is ever being given anywhere. In order to be in so many places at once he recorded the entire 10-day course to audio and video tapes that would be played either while we were meditating (audio) or during an hour long discourse every evening (video). Yeah, it's really lame, but at least this way I knew I was getting exactly the same experience as everybody else around the world. I wasn't relying on having a "good" guru.

The discourse was the intellectual arm of the course, explaining everything we were doing at the precise times we were experiencing them. After conducting those courses for the 30 years before he videotaped them, he'd learned exactly what to say to us when. So we learned the history of Vipassana. Apparently, it was exactly and only what Buddha taught and nothing more. Just his teaching before it got corrupted, which was a way of understanding all of reality through knowledge of oneself and ultimately attaining enlightenment this way. Buddha, as I came to understand, was interested in the nature of the universe as much as any noted scientist of the past 400 years, except that he lived without any instruments with which to study the outside world. Instead, he went on the premise that we could never understand the outside world by direct observation anyway beause we would have to narrow its attributes to those detectable by our senses. Any instrument as well, from a microscope to a bubble chamber, would be necessarily limiting our experience of the world to those attributes detectable by that instruement. Instead he hypothesized that our bodies our infinately observable, and by observing the inner world we'd be able to find truths that pertain to the outside world as well. This was either said on that first or second night, but I didn't understand it 'till much later anyway. I'll go more into detail as I come to learn certain parts of that myself, but you'll have to keep reading for that.

But basically, Buddha taught how to see these truths for yourself. No gods, no wierd rules, no statues, no ceremonies. It's basically a do-it-yourself handbook of Peace and Enlightenment, whose focus is experiencing truths for oneself instead of understanding things purely intellectually. This was exactly the way Buddha taught it, if you believe Burmese tradition. Here's the breif history if you care: India was covered in Vipassana practitioners for about 300 years after Buddha died, but eventually it ran the course of all religions and got perverted and corrupted. According to Goenka, a few small groups of Burmese monks kept Vipassana pure for the past 2500 years and now this guy was trying to reignite Buddha's spark. A noble cause. Anyway, my palate was wet and I got excited to try it again. One thing he did say, however, was that he kept noticing students had the hardest times on the 2nd and 6th days. He related the whole course to an operation that works on the deepest parts of the mind, and these are the days of rejection or doubt, after the first incision, where the patient wants to back out and run away. He warned us then. After the discourse we were bought back to the main hall where an audio tape told us to focus our attention on a smaller area of the nose of our choosing, either the lip of the nostril or a part in the middle or somewhere above my upper lip. We practiced for 30 minutes and then went to sleep.

Day 2: Quite possibly the longest day of my life. It was no longer "cool" to be stuck in this meditation hall for the two coldest and drowsiest hours of the morning, but I stuck to it (mostly out of fear that the happy smiling slavedrivers would do something). I was determined not to fall into this trap he had warned us again, and I actually managed to bounce out of bed and head down. For those two hours, I tried my absolute best to not get discouraged, and maybe I spent a full 10% concentrating this time.

After breakfast I went back to sleep. When the gong woke me up, I was pissed and didn't want to go at all. It was a total turn around from that morning. My back hurt, I was exhausted. I had no desire to go, yet I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the hall in a way that reminded me exactly of the last year of college having to wake up early for my Physical Chem course.

Actually much of this day was spent thinking about its relation to that P-chem course. I kept finding that concentrating on absolutely nothing but this one tiny little part on the front of my nostril was as hard, if not harder, as concentrating on the most boring and unintelligable of mathamatical proofs for extended periods of time. Not only that, but I felt that same sense of frustration boil up from inside me and form a complete and total block that stopped me from progressing any further. I was to later learn this in subconscious terms, that an inner part of me rebelled against any inner probing that might lead to its eventual demise, and it put up a curtain of severe aggitation to stop me. This made perfect sense once I realized it, but only because this aggitation had formed such a curiously complete block that it was impossible to pass. It's the same frustration we all feel when we know we have to do something and it's not just that we don't want to do it, but it becomes unreasonably impossible to progress any further without going outside for a walk or something. This frustration manifested itself physically as well, tying up my back in painful irritating muscle spasms and constantly diverting my attention to the coming pains in my legs from sitting cross-legged for any more than a few minutes at a time.

This was where John's advice of trying to sing entire albums or recite full movies came into play. I got through most of 40 Oz. to freedom and the entire B-side of Abbey road without stopping. It seemed my attention span had at least increased in that way. But the boredom. The intense, unwavering boredom wouldn't leave me alone. The only way to deal with the boredom was to focus on my breath, which would eventually make me so frustrated I'd prefer boredom.

But the reality was that I was stuck there. The rules were strict, and I lived in perpetual fear of being reprimanded by one of the Happy Smiling Slavedrivers who, between all their bows and smiles would ask you so kindly to return to what you're supposed to be doing that you just feel aweful for every being so ungrateful. So for 3 hours I waited for that 11:00 lunch bell, doing my best to concentrate and supress the frustration, which seemed to only make it worse.

Lunch was bliss. I learned to make fajitos out of the tortillas, using various combinations of the veggies, and dipping it into the bean soup. Oh, the thrill of it.
But eventually lunch was over. I went back to sleep.
I barely rolled out of bed at the call of the 1:00 bell, because I knew this would lead to 4 straight hours of "meditation."

Possibly because of the refreshed perspective, but more likely due to my sense of mental self-preservation, I began to realize the nature of the exercise. Concentration was the goal of the exercise, but it was also the method of survival. Once one surrenders fully to the concentration of any one thing, time narrows discreetly down to the present. One of the topics mentioned in the discourse the night before was that the reason we can't concentrate is because the mind has been conditioned to divert all attention away from the present. Any attempt to focus on the present results in memories of the past or plans of the future. The mind has become a sort of wild animal, and the purpose of these first few days had been to beat it into submission. As I'd focus in on the present, however, boredom and frustration become impossible. Boredom is the comparison between the present situation and one of the past or future that may be more exciting. If past and future are eliminated, the only moment that exists is the present. With no comparisons to a more preferable situation, boredom becomes impossible and ideally you could concentrate forever. Similarly, frustration is the aversion to the present situation by comparison to a more preferable one. If the idea of a more preferable situation were eliminated, frustration would too disappear. The same thing happens with concentration on anything. It's perfectly reasonable to get lost in the most boring task and never realize any frustration or boredom until you become aware of the outside world, or things you could be doing.

At the end of the day we had small meditation sessions with the head guru, where he would ask some questions and then say something, then we'd meditate together. The Head Guru was this old guy who sits in the front of the class with his legs crossed, completely obscured by the layers of clothing and blankets and big Nepali (looks kinda Russian) hat covering every bit of him but his face, which was always tilted downward as he slept most of the time, except for occational bouts of consciousness in which he would bumble awake just long enough to shout sal-ZAK!, which apparently means WAKE UP in Nepali, and then he falls back asleep or watches over us intently for a few minutes and then falls back asleep. When I got to actually come close to him during the small sit-in meditation, I found his face to be completely benevolent, childlike, and compassionate to everything any of us had to say. It had that kind of permanent smile that only existed in the eyes, and was such a stark contrast to what he looked like from far away that eventually I came to finding questions just for the purpose of being around him to ask them. Props to this guy for filling the role perfectly.

During this session, he told me that we weren't actually yet practicing Vipassana, that this was just a concentration exercise to prepare us for the real teaching. With that knowledge I went to bed excited for the next day.



Day 3 and 4 kinda blended together. The instructions had changed from being aware of respiration to becoming aware of all the sensations present in the entire nose region, and eventually just to the sensations present between the upper lip and the nostril. You'd think that'd be a boring task but after a few hours I noticed there was a whole lot going on there. There'd be itches, tingles, pressure ripples, tiny skin permutations related to the movement of your nostrils in response to the respiration.

This was actually where things started getting cool. I gradually came to sharpen my mind to notice smaller and smaller things. I learned a lot about the experience of an itch if you sit and observe it carefully instead of ever scratching it. It moves! I had no idea. Imagine my excitement for learning that most of my itches would move about a half inch before dying away, given the boredom surrounding it. At one point I was convinced I felt the itch of a single neuron, which I could tell because it was rediculously faint and "twinkled" rapidly between being on or off with no gray area in between.

So you sit there for an hour and observe the jungle of sensation that somehow cropps up around the mustache area, then go outside and all the trees are sparkly. Really, it's that easy and unexpected. It might initially have something to do with being couped up in the dark for so long, but the experience lasts for several hours. I noticed this first on the third day after thinking about the ultra-subtle sensations around my nose for a few hours, and when I got outside I could swear I was on mescaline. This made sense to me intellectally, if the mind is trained to observe subtler and subtler characteristics of the body, it might pick up on things otherwise thrown out by the "reducing valve" Huxley described as his "Doors of Perception." The radiance and intensity of colors was reminiscent of my previous mescaline experiences, so I got excited and kept working at it until the sensations got more elaborate and easier to perceive. The amount of hard work required for this course cannot be stressed more. I struggled to concentrate more than any other class I've ever taken (mostly because I had no other alternative for entertainment), and this time the reward is immediate.

I also started to notice several other changes in my perception and thought patterns. My concentration was improving, for one, and by the end of the third day I had no trouble concentrating on my breath for several minutes at a time. Because the array of sensations around the nose area are infinately more interesting, I could focus intently on that one small area for up to 30 minutes without any stray thoughts. The inside of my head, as well, felt clear somehow. Actually it felt embarassingly like having the cobwebs cleaned out, or some massive Spring Cleaning when all the excess furniture was taken out. Sitting here typing this and remembering that feeling in relation to my present state, I recognize those days as having been devoid of all that background chatter going on in my mind that I never noticed until it was gone: what am I doing now, what am I doing after this, did I lock my door, should I be meeting anyone right now, am I forgetting something, I really need to buy that, I should email this guy, etc. All these thoughts combine to form some kind of static background noise in the back of my head, and these were all the thoughts that kept creeping up after I silenced my important, current thoughts. By the third day of meditation, most of these were silenced as well, so when I did have important current thoughts to consider, they had my undevided attention. Again, I thought of how useful this skill will be for med school.

On the afternoon of Day 4, we were finally given instruction in Vipassana. This came in the form of a 2-hour lecture during which we weren't supposed to change our posture at all. Mind you, by this point I'd worked up to only 20 minutes without changing postures. We sat in the main hall until the chanting came again, then we were instructed to move the area of awareness from the mustache/nose area to the top of the head. Once we started feeling any kind of sensation there, we were to move our attention down, gradually through every part of the body, passing each part only after a sensation was felt. So this is Vipassana.


Day 4, 5, and 6 were spent gradually developing this skill. With each sweep from head to toe, the sensations got subtler and subtler until a thin layer of them covered the entire body. The trick is, the more calm the mind, the subtler sensations you can experience. A panicky mind, for example, will hardly even experience pain. A furious mind, as well, would experience massive pains but usually not itches. A calm mind might experience knots in your back. In order to experience these extremely subtle sensations, one must be in a complete state of tranquility, bordering on hypnosis. This screws up any scheme of immediately analyzing any experience, since the realm of conscious analysis is far too exciting to feel these sensations. As soon as any such analyzing thought comes to mind, the sensations disappear. It's kinda like looking at a really dim patch of stars that disappear whenever you look directly at them. I soon learned, too, that my mind had been explicitly trained to analyze all information given me, so I spent one hell of a time trying to break this habit of immediate analysis (I'll be the first to admit that this is a very dangerous move, considering it could potentially open me up to some serious brainwashing. As far as I remember, or was allowed to remember, no instructions to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia were given). They soon told me the point wasn't even about the sensations themselves, Buddha just found them to be a useful tool to lure my mind into the meditative state. Only a meditative (hypnotised, thoughtless) state could experience these sensations, so I could walk this path backwards to achieve such a state by concentrating on the senations. Clever.


By the 6th day, as was warned during the first discourse, I was ready to leave. By then, I got real good at exploring my body from the inside out. I finally found out for myself the basis of Eastern Medicine, of inward study instead of outward study, and slowly I became personally aware of things I'd only read about. By the 6th day I could pinpoint 5 of my chakras and feel this intense pressure between my eyebrows (an experience a lot of people feel but is really not as exciting as a Third Eye experience would be, actually it got to be pretty annoying). I'd be able to mentally probe all of my muscles, and when I'd get bored I'd try to feel around some of my innerds. I was able to feel sensations down my esophagus down to my stomach pretty easily, but kept getting lost in my inner intestine. I was surprised to learn how big my lungs actually were, but for some reason I had trouble feeling any sensation within my heart. The coolest thing I did, and I know John would be proud of this one, was be able to accurately describe the size and shape of a turd based on the sensations around it. It was quite the deja-vu when it came out anyway. Stuff like that kept me occupied for a long time. I got really excited to actually be able to personally experience the Anatomy class I would be taking next year.
I felt that I had learned a very valuable technique and it'll be nice to go home and practice it. But I kept looking up at the mentally enhanced trees and getting itchy feet to go trekking, and my frustration doubled as I kept thinking about being trapped in this "camp." I wanted out, but for a totally different reason. The new meditation instructions were all new variations of the same concept--feeling sensations all over the body, and I figured I'd learned all I could learn.



The 7th day it changed

I was totally frustrated all morning and even after breakfast at having to waste more of my time sitting there while these beautiful mountains were all around, just waiting to be trekked.

At some point meditating just before lunch, I became aware of something more than bodily sensation. I became aware of my frustration as a sensation itself. For the past few discourses, the teacher told us about the relation between craving and aversion, how everything returned to the sense of craving, and once craving was illiminated then the real work could begin. What I was experiencing was craving itself, manifested as a physical sensation in the middle of my body about three inches above my solar plexus. It was an honest physical sensation that corresponded to a my mental craving to flee, and having observed it before reacting to it, I had three options:

1. I could do what I had always done and fuel it by thinking of how I wanted to get out of there. This would inevitably lead to the frustration growing, and getting pissed off at being stuck there until I'd be overpowered by emotion. Previously I would only notice the massive sensation of frustration. Now, for the first time, I could "feel" the seed of craving before it overpowered me.
2. I could try to supress this craving consciously, something I've been conditioned to do when I'm not supposed to feel something, and something which in the long run will inevitabely come out multiplied later down the road. I suppressed this desire to flee for the first 6 days, for example, and on the 6th day I was completely overwhelmed by it.
3. I could walk the fence and neither supress or fuel the sensation, and simply observe. This is the most difficult path, and is what is taught in Vipassana. Actually, I was to learn, this is the most applicable goal of early Vipassana training. To avoid the temptation to fuel or supress an emotion, to simply observe it as it wells up within, it'll eventually dissapate on its own.

Say I'm in a meditative state and I experience this craving to do something or to not do something. As soon as I'd give compliment it with thought, I would not only fuel it but I'd also break my meditative state. As I said earlier, the realm of thought is too exciting to experience subtle sensations. So if I let my mind concentrate on the source of this craving, it multiplies and I break out of this meditative state. Basically I pop back into awareness all pissed off. The basic instinct is to react to this sensation, but the only way to remain hypnotised is to not react at all. The applicable goal of this whole camp was to break this habit. If you can become aware of a negative emotion and identify it before it gets out of hand, you might be able to stop it before it grows strong enough to illicit an action. Say you're really, really pissed off all of a sudden. If you can focus in on the feeling of anger, you might be able to stop pouring gas on the fire before your hand goes through a wall. That's a worthy cause. Fortunately not too applicable to myself, but anybody who is easily overcome by emotion could benefit greatly from this course.

So anyway, I became aware of craving as a physical sensation and had the opportunity to consciously ignore it and let it pass. Every sensation passes, I've learend. From the tiny subtle sensations that last mere fractions of a second to the massive pains that last hours, it'll all pass. And just like that, the craving to get out of there will pass. They had been teaching this for a long time, to tell us to let cravings pass and be aware of them instead of reacting, but I'd realized then that never actually wanted Craving to leave. Craving is fun. Craving is the source of life and excitement and, one of my major realizations that blocked any further progress on the 6th day was that, let's face it, Buddhists are boring. They have no drive. I bet Richard Gere is a great guy but would probably bore your head off if you met him at a party, and I didn't want to turn into that. But eventually I surrendered to the fact that this attachment to Craving was what made me so miserable there. If I lost my cravings, my desires, I'd become a robot. By this point my mind was wide open, strained at so much concentration, and I was having less and less thoughts. All the thoughts I had left pertained to my cravings for food or sleep or to get the hell out of there, but other than that my mind was blank. I felt like a lobotomy patient, and I wasn't ready to let go of the last of my thoughts to complete (of as I later found out, Start) the surgery. I think Tom Waits put it best, "I'd rather have a BottleinFrontofme than a Frontal lobotomy." If I could only let go, on the other hand, I might actually learn something. So this time when I finally became aware of Craving as its own sensation, I surrendered to the technique and let it pass.

From that point on I felt exactly like a mental patient. Sitting in the cafeteria with white walls and metal dishes, with my shaved head and beenie feeling like a recently bandaged brain surgery, my head was no longer thinking of how strange it was that I was so excited to make fajotos out of Nepali food. I was actually, genuinely excited to make fajitos out of Nepali food. I consciously kept all other thoughts at bay just to see what I could get out of this mental state, but I do remember being genuinely, radiantly happy (soberly, and for no good reason at that) for the first time in a long while. The world maintained the mescaline visual feel, but with the added empathy of an ecstasy experience. I apologize for all these drug references, but I find it hard to describe these feelings in any other way, drugs just tend to open these doors automatically and temporarily. Here were the same sensations, only cheaper.

I spent the whole 2 hours of our lunch break in a daze. Few thoughts, but the thoughts I did have were all revealing in some way. I kept aware of my inner sensations and remained careful not to react to any cravings.

I came back to the meditation hall to have the most intense meditation experience of my time there to that point, that would consistently get beat the following day by a crazier one. This time, as I tried again to focus my concentration on my inner sensations, I'd notice knots appearing in my back to block the subtle free-flowing sensations I had come to enjoy. With the mind trained on the most subtle of sensations, even the smallest knot in my back caused enough pain to break my concentration and try to massage or stretch it out.

When the mind is totally blank long enough, it will fulfill its own necessity of constantly chewing on memories by pulling up the really old memories. Things popped up from my childhood that I won't bother mentioning here because, in addition to being private, would be really boring to everyone else. Even I thought they were boring, and they were supposed to be my so-called "repressed" memories. I had no idea why I'd randomly think of such mundane things, and occasionally one of these memories would illicit some kind of emotional response out of nowhere. For example, I focused in tightly around one of the knots on my back and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the sensation of being absolutely terrified and angry at the same time. This emotion came out of nowhere, but with it came the crystal-clear memory of being trapped in a doctor's office by my mother. The doctor wanted to administer a 100-point scratch test on my back (a test where the skin is pricked with an allergen to see if there's an allergic reaction), and I cried so hard out of fear of the pain that they finally agreed not to do it. I must have been 5 or 6. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that one crept up...

But the thing that contrasted most with everything I'd believed previously was that the memories or emotions somehow correlated with the knots on my back. As my awareness moved to one of these knots, a memory would appear. I remember this one knot had appeared randomly, so I focused in on it to consciously ignore it and I had the image of a digital mushroom. I then focused on the thought of the mushroom until I was playing Mario in the living room of our old house and my little sister, still a toddler, came over and pulled my hair and I got so absolutely fed up with her that I went into a rage about how I could never get any sleep because she'd always come into my room and pull my hair because I was lying down. I was SO angry. I must have been 8 or 9. I let the anger come and go without adding to it, then the memory faded and the knot cleared up.

This really bothered me. Really, I mean I know I believe in a lot of mind-body mumbo jumbo stuff but whenever I'd hear that a knot or a pain is a "repressed memory," I'd stop taking that person seriously. This happened twice on my trip so far. But here I am, having experienced it personally, and I'm a little stuck. I guess I've experienced more to convince myself that it is true than to convince myself otherwise, so I might as well leave it at that.

In any case, it did make perfect sense to me that if I could concentrate all my awareness on a knot to consciously ignore it (if that makes any sense), it would dissapate. My understanding is that a knot is muscle that has overtightened to create pain, then the muscle around it overtightens in reacton, creating its own pain and causing a positive feedback reaction that ends in a stable ball of tension that remains after the original pain has left. If one can mentally go in there and stop the muscles from reacting to each other, the knot will eventually release. I guess this still leaves room that the origins of the knots could be repressed somethings, but in any case I used this understanding to clear knot after knot after knot as they would randomly pop into my back (and I do acknowledge most of them were due to my posture).

From that point on, every meditation session was more like a day at the spa. I'd come out a little lighter, with the same feeling as having relaxed all your muscle spasms after a deep-tissue massage. That, finally, was work being done on my inner self, and I could feel it happening when I'd come outside after a session and feel lighter.

That was basically it until the 9th day, which was the last day of real proper meditation. On the 10th, we'd break our code of silence and re-learn how to interact with people. But after breakfast on the 9th day, the teacher told us how to achieve Bangha state--that mystical crazy wierd cool state of existence that's the envy of every beginning Vipassana practitioner. It's the state of total realization of impermanence, where you become aware of every atom of your being and dissolve into a state of sensation. And, of course, as soon as he explained it I was overwhelmed by craving to experience it and lost all my focus for the next several hours.

He said the first step of this was to feel subtle sensation on absolutely every part of the body, that all the intense sensations should be gone. Eventually, even the long-term pains of my knees, legs, or back would disappate after being ignored long enough. Then, I could start feeling sensations inside (which I had already been doing so this part was easy) until the same subtle sensations coated the inside as well and all I was left with was this awareness of a spinal cord. Eventually, even the awareness of this solid spinal cord would turn to subtle sensations and I would achieve the Bangha state, whatever that was.

This is how it happened to me: as soon as I got to the point of subtle sensations all over me and blanketing most of my insides, two knots appeared in my back. It was the afternoon of the last real day and I was in no mood to deal with those knots, I figured I'd just go ahead feeling subtle sensations all over my body except for those two knots. After about 15 minutes of concentration, I was aware of every point in my body simultaneously and even my spinal cord had "dissolved" into a sea of floating sensations. Everything I had previously considered "solid" and "permanent" were now freely coming in and out of existence, but I was still aware of a human form. It's impossible to describe how I could do this, or why, but somehow I consciously dispersed this body of sensation into a cloud I felt was about 10 feet away from me. I felt just like a Nova, and was no longer aware of any part of myself except for those two knots on my back. It felt like, if someone was to look at me, I'd look like nothing but two eyeballs and two black smudges floating in midair. Actually they weren't even eyeballs, they were this distinct and still unpleasant pressure sensation between my eyebrows. I still don't know if this is the Bangha state, but it felt pretty cool. But that was it: pretty cool. Is that what I spent 10 days of my life doing? This? I spent about 5 minutes like this, trying to appreciate this odd sense of cloud-being and use it to find some semblance of God, or Power, or the Source, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Jesus, or ANYTHING that would turn this into a life-changing experience.

For a while I thought I had screwed up the experience because I didn't bother to get rid of those two knots, and the perception of them kept me grounded in reality. But I'm pretty sure that was it. I had experieced everything there was to know about the world--nothing. That was it. All my sensations are imparmenent and could not be relied upon for anything because I could fling them 10 feet away from my body if I so desired. Amazing.

The life-changing realization came a full day after this experience, when I put the course in perspective. It was all an exercise in impermence. The awareness each sensation, from pain to craving to this subtle stuff, is really to solidify the concept that every sensation is impermanent. The pleasant warm flow of sensation I'd been experiencing around my body, if looked closely, is not nearly homogenous. It's like looking at a static TV from far away to see gray, and then coming close to see a dance of thousands of particles of black and white clicking on and off. Everything about this sensation was impermanent, even my perception of it would always eventually pass. Between subtle sensations that lasted only the tinyest fractions of a second, and these massive pains that would last several minutes or longer, the whole concept of impermanence gradually took form.

Everything is impermanent. My perception of indigestion will pass, my numb leg will pass, my joint pains will pass. Even my arm itself will pass, my entire body will pass, this building will pass, the ground will change. Everything is impermanent. Rivers will change course, lakes dry up, and even a mountain is just a slow wave. Everything we know is changing, and will always be changing, and so the most rediculous thing we could ever do is get attached to anything being the same. It will change, as everything does. If you're attached to the way things "should be," you have no reason to get stressed when this picture threatens to change, because it always will. If you're attached to your belongings, why get upset when they get stolen or lost since they will stop being yours by one course or another? So many relationships end out of an attachment to the way the other person was when you first met them. Everything changes. Even I, this body, this mind, everything about me will eventually cease to be. There's nothing to hold on to, and no way to hold on to it anyway. It was the most depressing truth I've ever had to experience head-on.

But on the other hand, since I've become discretely aware of this nihilism, I'm free to enjoy things more fully. This moment right now is the only time things will ever be this way, so whenever something really fun is happening there's no reason not to get the most out of it. Everything good will change, so there's nothing wrong with getting the best out of it so long as you don't get depressed when the shit falls. When it does--you lost your job, your girlfriend dumped you, White Castle is closed--things will inevitably get better.

The trick is to control your craving for the good times. If you leave out any attachment to the good times, you can't possibly feel bad for the bad times. Similarly, if you don't get attached to the bad times, you won't contaminate the good times with past misery. Maybe I like this philosophy personally because it's one giant long extravagant way of saying what every man's been trying to tell his girlfriend for centuries, "Please babe, don't get attached." I mean, really, if there's no attachment then each others company can be fully enjoyed every time they're together, and there's no misery when the two are apart. But that's a different argument altogether...

Suffice it to say, I got to personally experience something which, although from the outside perspective might be looked at as simply a product of my imagination, I believe as experiential truth. The idea of physical knots manifesting from my deeper conscious, for example, is entirely unproven so nobody would believe it except those who had experienced it. To touch a totally different argument altogether, Buddha supposedly was able to feel his body down to the subatomic particle and determined that they pass in and out of existence so fast that they cease to be and reappear "trillions and trillions of times between every blink of the eye." He came short by I think another 150 orders of magnatude, but the idea was that he "felt" the reality of quantum physics 2500 years before it was "proven." It makes me reconsider the whole concept of truth, that if something that remains scientifically unproven could ever be considered truth. For me, brought me to the conclusion that the whole point of the scientific method is to be able to spread a conviction of truth that one person has to others. One person arrives at a conviction and would like to convince another, he outlines a thought process and shows evidence to support each step to guide the other person experientially to arrive at the same intellectual conclusion. This is what was done for me during this course, I was led by the hand down the same path that Buddha followed and found out, for myself, what he was talking about. I didn't feel muons or anything, but I did follow the path long enough to convince myself of several things that are now obvious to me. That, as far as I'm concerned, is good enough truth for me.



Tomorrow morning I'm heading on my trek. It's around the Annapurna region, about 300km of walking I think. The past few days I made good friends with one of the guys from the meditation camp, this Nepali guy who has been so incredibly and rediculously kind and generous (even though he's dirt poor and absolutely refuses to let me pay for anything). He's been so kind to me that it's kinda making me uncomfortable actually, so it'll be nice to get out. On the other hand, I'm going out on the longest camping trip of my life, alone, in the middle of a country during civil war, with nothing but a compass, a map, some money, and some clothes. I was told sleeping bags are useless since the hostels are so cheap, so I don't even have one. I've already met some friends to travel with and it's the high season and a very busy trail so I expect to see enough people along the way to never have to walk alone. Still, I'm really really REALLY looking forward to the opportunity to finally get out a bit and practice some of this meditation stuff I've been writing so much about. It'll be a good crunchy time, at long last.

I've also accidentally become a vegitarian, and I'll proably continue during the trek (they hardly have enough animals for milk and fur, let alone meat up there). No alcohol, either, for 2 weeks and probably 2 more (unavailable anyway also). It's a full detox. 4 weeks of total recouperation. The Eye of the Storm. OH THE HEPATIC FREEDOM! Kumbaya, my LORD....Koooom Bye YAh.