A Fortune-Teller Told Me (63 page)

A shiver ran down my spine, and I could hardly take notes anymore. None of the fortune-tellers I had seen had spoken of me with the precision with which the abbot unknowingly spoke of Khun Sa. Was it the date of birth? Or was it that I had mentally transmitted to him the three or four things I knew about Khun Sa? But in what language, given that we had none in common?

It was now Bertil’s turn. He knew exactly at what time he was born. After doing the calculations, the monk began:
“Your mother is still alive, but I don’t see your father. Perhaps he was already dead when you were born.”
Bertil was dumbfounded. It was true.

Intuition? Coincidence? Or perhaps this monk was a true, great astrologer, the best I had ever met. As we took our leave I was perplexed to think that for the sake of a joke I had eluded him.

A tiny sliver of moon shone over the valley as we returned to the inn. The cold was bone-chilling, but all around there was a wonderful peace.
The black trees traced their embroidery against the starry sky. On the big market square some of Khun Sa’s young recruits were still shooting at tin cans by the light of little candles shielded from the wind by waxed-paper shades. It was an exquisite scene: the last image I would take away of the Capital of Evil.

Ahead of us lay another nine-hour march up and down the mountains. I went to sleep a little sorry I could not stop and join the game.

A
nd so, in the end, I had come round to it. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, still as a rock, one hand on the other at navel height, palms upward, back straight, shoulders relaxed and eyes closed, thinking about the tip of my nose and trying to catch the moment when my breath, slowly and lightly flowing in and out, touched a certain point on my skin. Hour after hour, day after day, never saying a word, eating vegetarian food—the day’s last meal before noon—to bed at nine, without reading even one page of a book, to avoid distraction, striving constantly to be aware of every movement, every thought, every sensation.

Meditation: I had spent half my life in Asia and had never given it a thought. I had heard of people who practiced it, who went on these courses, but I always felt it had nothing to do with me. I saw it as something for disturbed people, an escapist response to the problems of the world. Incredible, but true. In China, Japan, Tibet, Korea, Thailand, Indochina, I had visited perhaps hundreds of temples and spent whole days in Buddhist monasteries, but I had never thought about the question of meditation. What is its aim? How is it done? What is the sense of it?

Attracted by their beauty, I had collected dozens of statues of Buddha. I had lived in their company—a Burmese one in bronze had presided silently over my library for more than twenty years—but I had never asked myself what they were doing, sitting in the lotus position with that magnanimous smile and those half-closed eyes, one hand in their laps and the other touching the ground. I had truly never wondered about it, as one might never wonder about the meaning of a crucifix that has hung over one’s bed since childhood.

But life is also a continuous waste. Think of how many wonderful
people we meet without realizing it, of how many beautiful things we pass every day on the way home without noticing them. It always requires the right occasion, a particular event, a person who stops you and draws your attention to this or that. The path that had brought me to the retreat in Pongyang was a labyrinthine one; but in the end, partly following the thread of the fortune-tellers—“Meditate!” so many of them had told me—and partly the trail of white stones laid down by Chang Choub, I gave in. Leopold told me in November that his teacher, John Coleman, was coming to give one of his courses in Thailand, and urged me to go along. “You must understand meditation,” he said, “otherwise what have you been doing all these years in Asia?” The idea of learning to meditate from an American, a former CIA agent, seemed strange; but then, it often takes a Westerner to help one understand some aspects of the East.

The retreat was in Pongyang, in northern Thailand. On one side of a narrow green valley a sprinkling of straw-roofed wooden bungalows lay among drifts of flowers and thickets of giant bamboo and frangipani; across the valley stood the great trees of the ancient jungle, with their lush foliage. The meditation pavilion was a large wooden terrace, near a foaming waterfall that fed a small lake bordered with red and orange flowers.

The day began before sunrise with the striking of a gong on the high terrace whose sound echoed kindly but sternly over the valley. Promptly some thirty torches appeared, twinkling like fireflies as the participants walked up the hill in the darkness. Each took his place on a square cushion, and meditated for an hour facing a platform where the teacher meditated beside a small altar with a Buddha and flowers. Then came breakfast, then two hours of guided meditation, with a quarter-hour break, then lunch—vegetarian—at eleven, then two hours of rest and more hours of meditation. At sunset there was a lesson on
dharma
, the way of the Buddha. The booming gong lent its rhythm to the hours. Its last call, slow and warm, came at nine o’clock—time for bed.

It had taken me twelve hours by train and another hour by car to reach Pongyang, but I would gladly have left the minute I arrived. The other participants were already there. Most were middle-aged women, no longer beautiful, no longer loved, but intelligent, still curious, unwilling to accept the mediocre roles forced on them by society and
hence at odds with life; women like those I had so often seen consulting fortune-tellers. Among the men there was not one with a real face. A Swiss said he was there because “Health is my hobby;” another, a Canadian, hoped to improve his painting through meditation. And what was I doing there? I felt like a patient in a psychiatric ward trying to convince himself that he has been brought there by mistake, or that his condition is less serious than that of his neighbors. But I tamed my arrogance, and stayed.

John Coleman was a big man, tall and heavy, jovial, simple, with anything but the ascetic air of holiness that I expected from a meditator. His assistant—about sixty, thin, straight and elegant with white hair cut very short like a marine—looked like just what he was: a general in the police force.

John had met the general, then a captain, in Bangkok in the early 1950s when he himself was a young American secret agent. It was he who had introduced John to the first steps in the path of meditation. Over the years the captain had had a successful career and had become the king’s aide-de-camp; he had retired not long before with a reputation of being one of the most honest police chiefs Thailand had ever known. A devout Buddhist, he had practiced meditation for more than forty years, and now he had taken it upon himself to teach it to others.

The first days were very tough. When I first sat in the lotus position it seemed quite comfortable, but after a quarter of an hour it became unbearable, and after half an hour it was absolute torture. My knees were all pins and needles, my back was one big cramp, and the urge to move became overwhelming. Never, not for one second, did I manage to meditate. Instead of fixing my thoughts on the point where my breath touched my skin, my mind was “a monkey jumping from branch to branch,” as John put it, and I was unable, even for the briefest instant, to turn it into “a strong, solid buffalo, to put a rope round its neck and tie it to a post.”

“Think only of that point, feel only that sensation of the breath touching your skin,” John repeated, very slowly, sitting on the platform like a great wax Buddha. “At the moment when your breath touches the surface of the skin at the nose, the nerve tissues in the skin respond with a feeling, a sensation, an experience of touch. Be aware of that sensation. Be aware of the in-breath and the out-breath, and thus greed,
hatred, and ignorance will be unable to arise. The fires of craving and aversion will be extinguished and your mind will be calm, peaceful, free of fears and anxiety.”

I kept my feet under my knees, my eyes closed, my hands still, but my mind, when it was not focused on the pain in my legs or on the desire to get up and scream, went rushing off in all directions; it fled, and I could not call it back. I did not dominate it; it was not mine. Useless. The pain became unbearable, and even before John announced the end of the hour, breaking the silence with his “Amen” (“may all our merits be shared by all beings”), I gave up, changed position and opened my eyes. I was frustrated to see how some of the others carried on serenely.

At various times I was on the verge of leaving. What was the point of keeping one’s eyes shut when surrounded by the beauty of nature? What was the point of thinking, only to expunge every thought, and of artificially inflicting upon myself some of the pain which life sooner or later deals out to everyone? I listened to the first “sunset sermons” with irritation. “Everything in life is suffering. We cause suffering when we are born, we die suffering, we suffer for what we want, we suffer for fear of losing what we have…” said John, sounding like a Bible salesman. I was annoyed by his talk of “a higher level of energy,” of “refining the magnifying glass of concentration.” The idea was that by spending the first three days thinking only of that point where the breath touches the skin, the mind would become calm—an exercise called
anapanaa
. Both the exercise and its rationale struck me as intellectually demeaning.

There were, however, some pleasures. One was the silence. In the opening ceremony we had formally pledged to observe, throughout the duration of the course, the Five Precepts: not to kill (that included any living being, even mosquitoes—hence no insecticides were used at Pongyang); not to lie; not to take what is not given; not to have sexual relations (“either with oneself or with others”); and not to take intoxicants (meaning not to drink coffee or smoke). We had also promised not to eat after midday, not to wear jewelry, not to use perfumes and not to sleep in an overcomfortable bed. And we had promised to keep the Noble Silence, not to speak or make sounds that might distract the others—and that was marvelous. When we met other participants between meditations there was no need to make conversation; a silent nod was enough. At table we did not have to talk merely to fill the at
times uncomfortable vacuum with even more vacuous banalities. Each of us was alone with himself.

This silence was a great discovery. Without the foreground of other people’s words, I realized that the glorious beauty of nature was in its silence. I looked at the stars and heard their silence; the moon made no sound; the sun rose and set without a whisper. In the end even the noise of the waterfall, the birdcalls, the rustle of the wind in the trees, seemed part of a stupendous, living, cosmic silence which I loved and in which I found peace. It seemed that this silence was a natural right of every man, and that this right had been taken from us. I thought with horror of how for so much of our lives we are pounded by the cacophony we have invented, imagining that it pleases us, or keeps us company. Everyone, now and then, should reaffirm this right to silence and allow himself a pause, some days of silence in which to feel himself again, to reflect and regain a degree of health.

Another pleasure came from the effort. As the days went by, the commitment to the various prohibitions acquired more and more value, and gave a sense of increasing strength. That strength, John said, served to “create a base of morality” for the next stage of meditation. Precisely by making the effort, one came to feel that one deserved some sort of reward. “In the last days you will understand. Everything will make sense. Everything will find its place,” repeated John, giving hope that by concentrating on that point where the breath touches the skin we would gain control of our minds, and with that new horizons would open.

That was the real reason for my being there. During my year on the trail of fortune-tellers I had become fascinated by the mind’s possibilities and powers. I had come to believe that in the West, for various reasons, the use of the mind has become more limited over the course of time, and a great part of its capacity has been lost. I wanted to rediscover that forgotten path, if it had ever existed. Could it be that the mind is like a muscle which atrophies if it isn’t used to the full? I thought about myself. For years I have run a few miles every day, and exercised to keep fit. But when have I ever looked after my mind? When have I ever done exercises to strengthen it and allow it to reach its full capacity? The mind is perhaps the most sophisticated instrument we have, yet we do not even give it the attention we give to our leg muscles.

Alexandra David-Neel, the extraordinary French explorer of the
Himalayas in the 1930s, tells of Tibetan lamas who could dematerialize themselves through mental effort alone, and of others who could communicate with each other over long distances. All fiction? Perhaps not. Perhaps in the human mind there really was something that we have lost along the road. Some Europeans, supposing that somewhere in the world there were still human beings able to use their minds in that way, have gone to look for them in Asia. In 1924 a young Englishman, Paul Brunton, traveled to India to meet yogis, hermits and fakirs. He tried to find out how, through the exercise of the mind, they had attained a knowledge which he believed was being destroyed by modernization. The first step in all the different paths to that knowledge was meditation. Therefore it was worthwhile trying to understand what it was.