The Antidote (7 page)

I had arrived at the Insight Meditation Society earlier that afternoon, sharing a taxi from the nearest major railway station, about twenty-five miles away, with an Israeli student I'll call Adina. As we bounced along uneven backwoods roads, she explained that she was attending the retreat because she felt lost. ‘It's like I have no roots anywhere … nothing to hold on to, no structure in my life,' she said. I couldn't help wincing inwardly at her candour: we'd only just met, and as far as I was concerned this was oversharing. But what she said next made sense. She was hoping that meditation might be a way not to stop feeling lost, but to come to see the lostness differently – to embrace it, even. The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön calls this ‘relaxing into the groundlessness of our situation', and it harmonises well with the idea of non-attachment. Chödrön suggests that ‘groundlessness' is actually everyone's situation, all the time, whether they like it or not. It's just that most of us can't relax in the presence of that truth; instead, we frantically scramble to deny it.

Our taxi driver seemed lost in a more literal sense, plunging down rutted tracks through the forest, then reversing back up them again, cursing his satellite navigation system. The meditation centre proved seriously hard to find, which wasn't surprising; isolation was the point. When we finally arrived, I was shown to my room – a narrow, monkish cell, looking out over miles of uninterrupted forest. It contained a single bed, a sink, a small wardrobe, a shelf, and nothing else. I stowed my suitcase under my bed and hurried to the main hall, where a staff member outlined the week's ground rules. We would be expected to spend one hour a day helping to clean the building, or prepare food, or do the dishes, she explained. In a few moments' time, she would
ring the small brass gong on the building's central staircase, and we would be expected to fall silent – with only a handful of exceptions, including emergencies and question-and-answer sessions with the teachers – for the rest of the retreat. Since we wouldn't be speaking, she added, it would be best if we kept our eyes downcast, too, so as to avoid the temptation to spend the week communicating via smiling, scowling, and winking. There would be no alcohol, no sex, no use of telephones or the internet, no listening to music, and also no reading or writing – since these, she said, could rupture one's interior quiet as surely as audible conversation. Then again, as the daily schedule we found pinned to the noticeboard made clear, there would be no time for any of that, anyway:

5.30 a.m. – Waking bell

6.00 a.m. – Sitting meditation

6.30 a.m. – Breakfast

7.15 a.m. – Work period (kitchen cleaning, food preparation, etc.)

8.15 a.m. – Sitting meditation

9.15 a.m. – Walking meditation

10.00 a.m. – Sitting meditation

10.45 a.m. – Walking meditation

11.30 a.m. – Sitting meditation

12.00 noon – Lunch, followed by rest

1.45 p.m. – Walking meditation

2.15 p.m. – Sitting meditation

3.00 p.m. – Walking meditation

3.45 p.m. – Sitting meditation

4.30 p.m. – Walking meditation

5.00 p.m. – Light meal

6.15 p.m. – Sitting meditation

7.00 p.m. – Walking meditation

7.30 p.m. – Dharma talk

8.30 p.m. – Walking meditation

9.00 p.m. – Sitting meditation

9.30 p.m. – Sleep or further meditation

‘Well, that'll be the structure you were looking for,' I said to Adina, who was standing nearby. The moment I'd said this, it struck me as an annoying, smart-aleck kind of remark. What made it worse, somehow, was that it was the last thing I said. A few seconds later, we heard the deep ring of the gong, and silence descended.

It didn't take very long on the meditation cushion, however, to discover that outer silence did not automatically confer inner silence. For the first several hours after receiving the basic instructions – the rest of the first evening, and most of the following morning – my mind was occupied almost exclusively by song lyrics, looping loudly on repeat. Inexplicably, and appallingly, they were mostly the lyrics to the 1997 song ‘Barbie Girl', by the Danish–Norwegian kitsch-pop group Aqua, a track I had always despised. The music was interrupted only by occasional anxious thoughts about how I was going to make it through the week, plus stray entries from my to-do list that I'd forgotten to deal with prior to my departure.

In my defence, this – the mental chatter in general, not ‘Barbie Girl' – is almost everybody's first experience of silent meditation. When you eliminate the distractions of external noise, and turn your attention inwards, what strikes you first is this: it's almost constantly noisy in there. It's not that the inner chatter is somehow generated by the attempt to meditate. It's simply that outer noise, the rest of the time, drowns out the inner noise; in the silence of the forest and the meditation hall, it all became suddenly
audible. ‘One realises', as the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti once put it, ‘that one's brain is constantly chattering, constantly planning, designing: what it will do, what it has done, the past impinging itself on the present. It is everlasting chattering, chattering, chattering.'

An understandable response to such chatter, when you're attempting to meditate, is to try to quieten it – to dampen it down, or perhaps even to try to stop thinking altogether. But one central principle of
vipassana
meditation, the variety taught at the Insight Meditation Centre, is the opposite: to let the clamour be. As the Buddhist teacher Steve Hagen says in his pithy guidebook
Meditation: Now or Never,
‘we do not try to forcefully detach ourselves from the feelings, thoughts and expectations that arise in our mind. We don't try to force anything into or out of the mind. Rather, we let things rise and fall, come and go, and simply be … there will be times in meditation when we're relaxed, and times when our minds are agitated. We do not seek to attain a relaxed state, or to drive out our agitated and distracted mind. That is just more agitation.' This is the first big step towards non-attachment: learning to view passing thoughts and feelings as if one were a spectator, not a participant. Consider it too closely, and this idea becomes dizzying, given that watching your own thought processes is itself a thought process; it can be easy to feel caught in some kind of infinite loop.

Fortunately, it isn't necessary to resolve this conundrum in order to practise meditation. The technique, as Howard had explained, is simply to return – every time you realise you've been carried away by a narrative, or by an emotion – to the breath. The following evening, during the teachers' daily talk, he quoted the Catholic mystic St Francis de Sales, a practitioner of Christian meditation: ‘Bring yourself back to the point quite gently. And
even if you do nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.' There is more to non-attachment than this – and much more, it's worth emphasising, to Buddhism than non-attachment. But it is where it all begins.

It becomes easier to make sense of this when you realise that Buddhism, though we think of it today as a religion, was originally just as much an approach to the study of psychology. The central Buddhist psychological text, the
Abhidhamma,
is a ferociously complex tome of lists and sub-clauses and technical argument. But one of its more straightforward insights is the notion that the mind can be viewed, in many respects, as one of the senses – like seeing, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Just as we receive smells through the ‘sense-door' of the nose, and tastes through the sense-door of the tongue, it's possible to see the mind as a kind of sense-door, too, or as a screen on which thoughts are projected, like images in a cinema. This isn't how we usually think about thinking. Sounds and smells and tastes, after all, are just sounds and smells and tastes, but thoughts, we tend to assume, are something much more important. Because they come from within us, they feel more essential, and expressive of our deepest selves. But is that true, really? When you start meditating, it soon becomes apparent that thoughts – and emotions – bubble up in much the same uncontrollable, unbidden fashion in which noises reach the ears, smells reach the nose, and so on. I could no more choose for thoughts not to occur than I could choose not to feel chilly when I was woken by the ringing of the morning bell at five-thirty each day – or, for that matter, than I could choose not to hear the bell.

Seeing thoughts as similar to the other five senses makes
non-attachment seem much more approachable as a goal. In the analogy most commonly used by contemporary Buddhists, mental activity begins to seem more like weather – like clouds and sunny spells, rainstorms and blizzards, arising and passing away. The mind, in this analogy, is the sky, and the sky doesn't cling to specific weather conditions, nor try to get rid of the ‘bad' ones. The sky just is. In this the Buddhists go further than the Stoics, who can sometimes seem rather attached to certain mind-states, especially that of tranquility. The perfect Stoic adapts his or her thinking so as to remain undisturbed by undesirable circumstances; the perfect Buddhist sees thinking itself as just another set of circumstances, to be non-judgmentally observed.

Even more challenging than practising non-attachment to passing thoughts and feelings is practising it in the presence of physical pain; to be non-judgmental about being in agony seems preposterous. But it is here that some of the most powerful scientific evidence for cultivating non-attachment has been accumulating in recent years. Some Buddhists, such as Barry Magid, might object to the implication that the benefits of meditation need to be scientifically ‘proven'. But the science is intriguing nonetheless – especially in the case of a series of experiments conducted in 2009, at the University of North Carolina, by a young psychologist named Fadel Zeidan.

Zeidan wanted to test the effects of meditation on people's ability to endure physical pain, and so, with refreshing straightforwardness, he decided to hurt them. His research employed mild electric shocks – jolts that weren't sufficient to be harmful, but that were powerful enough to make limbs twitch – and participants were asked to rank their subjective experience of the pain. Some then received three twenty-minute lessons in mindfulness meditation over the course of the next few days, showing them
how to develop non-judgmental awareness of their thoughts, emotions, and sensations. When further electric shocks were administered, those who used the meditation techniques reported significantly reduced pain. (In a related experiment by Zeidan's team, using brain scans and pain created by a hot-plate, meditation appeared to lead to less pain for every participant, with the reductions ranging from 11 to 93 per cent.) A critic might counter that the meditation was merely providing a distraction, giving the participants something else to focus on – so Zeidan had another group perform a mathematics task while being shocked. Distraction did have some effect, but it was nowhere near as large as that of meditation. And the meditation lessons, unlike distraction, lowered pain levels even when participants didn't actively meditate during the shocks.

‘It was kind of freaky for me,' Zeidan said. ‘I was ramping at four to five hundred milliamps, and their arms would be jolting back and forth, because the current was stimulating a motor nerve.' Yet still their pain assessments remained low. Meditation, Zeidan believes, ‘had taught them that distractions, feelings and emotions are momentary, [and] don't require a label or judgment, because the moment is already over. With the meditation training, they would acknowledge the pain, they realise what it is, but they let it go. They learn to bring their attention back to the present.' If you've ever gripped the arms of a dentist's chair, in expectation of imminent agony that never actually arrives, you'll know that a big part of the problem is attachment to thoughts about pain, the fear of its arrival, and the internal struggle to avoid it. In Zeidan's laboratory, focusing non-attachedly on the experience of pain itself rendered the experience much less distressing.

As the hours turned into days at the Insight Meditation Society,
however, my attachments seemed only to grow more intractable. By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the meditation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified – a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously?

Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. They call it a
‘vipassana
vendetta'. In the stillness, tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually – but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep.