The Attraction of Knowledge Would Be Small If One Did Not Have to Overcome So Much Shame On the Way

Friedrich Nietzsche is my favorite writer and thinker.

A superficial part of me wishes I could say someone else, some other inspiring author with too much common touch to be dismissed as merely academic or oddball. Fans of difficult and unpopular dead white men arouse suspicions of posturing, as eccentric or smart. Sometimes these suspicions are dead-on.

Sometimes not.

The labels that dog and shame Nietzsche lovers are excessive. Stereotypes hijack his genius and taunt sympathetic readers—first as fascists and nowadays as dabblers at this thing called thinking.

As I re-read the Gay Science, I know I’m not the only defensive fan out there. Walter Kaufmann—prominent dead Anglo theologian and Nietzsche translator nonpareil—was, throughout his life, at great pains to rescue the misjudged moustachioed polemicist. There are about a dozen places in each translated work in which Herr Genius bristles against dogma or anti-Semitism, and, at each point, commentator Kaufmann is quick with a “Look! Again, not a Nazi!” His unending string of footnotes is distracting, often incorrect and entirely necessary to remind the reader that the brilliant mind behind the thoughts is more than a mere nutcase pushing for God’s death at the hands of racist supermen. That’s the old stereotype.

The new stereotype is adolescent angst. Think of the insufferable colorblind mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, whose Nietzsche obsession is amusing and nothing more than pubertal. Think Fight Club wannabes.

I got the slightest whiff of the new stereotype a couple nights ago when a friend and I were discussing books and he was surprised I said Nietzsche was my favorite writer (“You mean thinker?”). He then added that he had read him years ago and didn’t remember a thing about him. I could see someone not respecting him, but to not remember his ideas is inexcusable.

Exhibit A, Nietzsche is a good writer: Nietzsche writing on writing (all italics his):

"Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices—you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written—what are the only things we are able to paint? Always, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand—by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer—only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds; but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my beloved-wicked thoughts."

Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) once said that metaphors hold the most truth in the least space. I think that’s a truth manifest in Nietzsche, on every page, and probably the reason Encyclopedia Britannica refers to him as the most brilliant German prose writer ever. His writing is what writing’s all about—an imparting of what you know of the overlap of beauty and truth, the seizure of that knowledge in its afternoon and the hurling of it onto paper, the placement of new days in someone else’s head. A man who knew that “whatever is said well is believed,” Nietzsche succeeded at writing as well as possible.

The masterful use of English language above owes partly to the devoted Kaufman at work, something won in translation. It was Kaufmann’s intention to capture the “dance” of Nietzsche’s language that had been lost in prior editions.

So I’m reading Nietzsche again. He’s been my main man since college, and after the Vipassana retreat, I felt a faint need for guidance.

***

Digression: It’s interesting to think that Nietzsche may be the closest person I have to a role model.

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to be pretentious.

I don’t feel I had any real role model growing up. I had lots of partial ones throughout my fortunate childhood. There’s my dad, who’s pretty unbeatable for girls advice, and mom, who’s great for jobs advice, and Bruce, one of the happiest and smartest people I know who acted almost as a third parent and often helped me to deal with the other two. There’s my friend Will, an army of activism and a charity fund in himself, who I often ask to double as my conscience. I can go on and on.

I see no reason dead people couldn’t also count, at least by the way I judge them:

Let Role Model, RM, be a product, where RM = G*R*A*(E-iT), where G is “genius,” R the “relevance of ideas to Charles,” A “accomplishments in life,” E “empathy” and iT “Intolerance.” Genius is the nearly impossible insight, the more improbably well put the better. The difference E-iT is, effectively, self-overcoming, which, when multiplied against A, represents life worth, the “model” half of role model. This formula’s pretty good for having just come up with it. In fact, it’s close to great—get it?

All these variables can be on a scale of 1-10, if you wish. If no mere mortal can score a perfect 10-to-the-fourth, then Nietzsche comes close to immortality, at least via Charles Role Model Algebra. His hatred of women, perhaps, lends a detracting iT of “2,” a value that'd be higher if he hadn’t tempered his chauvinism as a metaphor for truth (“Supposing truth were a woman, what then?” etc).

His genius receives a rare 10, reserved for the likes of Einstein and Shakespeare. I won’t go into why here, that requires too much for a blog entry. I can say that, of any thinker—alive or dead, author or other—I agree with him the most. And he contributes the most thoughts to my brain that I wouldn’t possess otherwise. I admire his perspectivism and his compassion, the latter dressed up in so much seeming malice as to require the undressing process of multiple reads. And his life itself—his decade of staggering triumphs over horrible illness after horrible illness before finally going completely insane thanks to tertiary syphilis—sets fire to his words, after the book is put down.

During weak times I find I can turn to his texts, probably in a manner analogous to how religious people revere their own sacred books, though I revere nothing sacred or perfect about Nietzsche. When someone attacks his worth, I hide a feeling inside similar to wanting to defend a father-figure, not a God.

I’m sure you feel the same about some book or song. That’s just how it goes, it is what it is.

***

As Nietzsche said of himself, I, too, read myself into books because “I clearly need some help.”

So I’m reading The Gay Science right now, again, and he’s already reignited in me an exuberance unto surrender, something I thought would be immediate at Vipassana. His writing isn’t just acrobatics, made up of audacious synonyms and inspired metaphors, more common in fiction than non. It’s an uncluttering of my thoughts through their rearrangement. And then I realize I’m wearing yet another ridiculous mask. A shield of humor that conceals envy, an armor of strength concealing nothing but---it's not just about me or you, of course. There’s more reflected in his mirror than any one individual. He just sometimes makes the planet seem that small.

Why the old stereotype took hold is easy enough: his estranged sister Elisabeth was married to an actual proto-Nazi. Upon his madness and death, she did a good job whittling down the universe of her brother’s thought, diminished it enough to fit into a tiny totalitarian hole. He was posthumously born under Axis flags.

In his postwar rebirth, Nietzsche somehow got saddled with the new stereotype, and how this happened is for someone else to explain. Its an exaggeration to say that the man needs a third incarnation, but a Kaufman 2007 couldn’t hurt, a translator to make Nietzsche okay again, someone accepted by people of all intellects and ages, like John Lennon or Ray Romano, someone to see and to say “Look! Again, not juvenile! In fact, he’s much, much smarter than you!”

Here are some new favorite quotes from the first fifty pages of The Gay Science. These resonate with me, now.

Since I grew tired of the chase
And search; I learned to find;
And since the wind blows in my face,
I sail with every wind

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

(This naturally brings me back to Thoughts and Opinions on Vipassana. Success is a yes, failure a no. Experiences are too often mistaken for more than they are—for mistakes, disservices to inner royalty.)

Pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back.

(Is gratitude the consciousness of happiness, the concluded investigation into the origin of pleasure?)

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

(Is this the limit of love of all types, or the limit of infatuation? Or desire?)

What we know about ourselves and remember is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as people suppose. One day that which others know about us (or think they know) assaults us—and then we realize that this is more powerful. It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation.

Half of your life is done,
And it was pain and error, through and through:
Why do you still seek on?
Precisely this I seek: The reason why!

Respiration, Desperation

Part One

Lots of people ask me about the benefits of meditation and if they work for me when I practice.

I am a big fan of meditation, and, yes, I do feel its benefits. It is, in fact, the most mentally healthy thing I know that I can do for myself, and I would like to think that semi-regular practice has begun to change me in some significant ways.

First off, it may be the best way to learn how to deal with pain of all sorts. For example, let’s say you’re meditating on your breath, paying very close attention to its movement in and out of your nostrils. You’ll inevitably become distracted. How do you deal with these distractions—whether they be a wandering mind, back pain or someone talking in another room? Getting frustrated and dwelling on them won’t help. On the other hand, if you can adequately integrate them into your resumption of concentration on the breath, you can use this ability to daily advantage. You begin, for example, to learn to roll with the punches—whether they be an unexpected traffic jam or illness. I speculate that this “play through pain” capacity, if large enough, could help with bigger blows as well, like injury or even dying.

Secondly, though I need to experiment more in this area, meditation may also be the best voluntary way to ingrain good habits into your unconscious. Self-aware readers, how many times do you tell yourself and others “I should know better” or “I know I’m wrong, but…” or “I shouldn’t, but….”? Imagine if you spent thirty minutes a day dwelling only on something you know you should do but don’t, some truth in which you believe that goes contrary to your current behavior. So much time is spent exploring how the unconscious impacts the conscious, why not try driving in reverse for awhile?

And it’s not a surprise that meditation is good for mental disorders. Let’s say you’re anxious or angry, for example. American workaday fear usually presents itself as a false choice of fight-or-flight from something that is actually a total non-threat. Worry is usually unproductive. Since meditation teaches you to experience life present moment-by-present moment, it’s inimical to fear and anger--both of which usually concern the future and the past more than the present--by identifying them properly as emotions invading present consciousness. Stripped naked to pure emotion, these swamps harboring narrow-minded and irrational thoughts (e.g., revenge, agoraphobia…) begin to evaporate.

Meditation is also probably physically healthy. People who don’t stress out simply live longer. Its practice also directly boosts the immune and cardiovascular systems.

Even the side effects are great. Try, for instance, to think about whatever you want, with your eyes closed, back straight, breathing deep breaths from your abs. Do this for just ten minutes and tell me you don’t feel calm and collected. Or try it for a full minute during, say, panic or road rage.

Finally, not only a road to happiness, meditation is a boulevard to truth, lined with palm trees along the median. For example, it’s true that the past and the future really don’t exist, not in a strictly physical sense. Although the layers of sediment that define who we are in the present reside in the past, the past itself is dead and the future always nothing more than a looming, metaphysical unknown. Despite all our pity/nostalgia towards the past and hope/fear/conversation regarding the future, the present moment where you are, right now, is the only reality. Meditation lets you experience this truth that I think we all dropped somewhere at the brink of adulthood. Now, as productive members of society, we all too often see the use behind everything and can’t even pay proper attention to the food we eat, the person we’re talking to, or the music we’re listening to. This is the most cliché and foundational of all truths: “life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” “forget the past,” etc…more power to it. From here, I believe, devolve insights into personal liberation.

Part Two

This whole blog entry is really about discovering the limits of my devotion to meditation, the pastime that I mistook for a possible life philosophy in itself. By attending and brutally failing to complete the Dhamma Pakasa Vipassana meditation retreat, I realized that though I have been more than dabbling with meditation, I haven’t been doing much more.

To dabble with something is to dip into it, and if thirty minutes a day is dabbling with meditation, then the Vipassana 10-day retreat is an Acapulco cliff dive.

“This fleeting moment, if we are unaware of it, is repeated and intensified into craving and aversion, becoming a strong emotion that eventually overpowers the conscious mind. We become caught up in the emotion, and all our better judgment is swept aside…But if we are aware at the point where the process of reaction begins–that is, if we are aware of the sensation–we can choose not to allow any reaction to occur or to intensify… in those moments the mind is free..With repeated practice those few brief moments will become seconds, will become minutes, until finally the old habit of reaction is broken, and the mind remains continuously at peace. This is how suffering can be stopped.”

-Vipassana Buddhist theologian S.N. Goenka, my teacher for one day

This is more or less the philosophical foundation for the ten days of practice. And you can read all you want, but practice is all-important. Reading (or writing) about the virtues of meditation won’t take you anywhere.

Still, I feel good about leaving, and, to quote Roger Ebert quoting Ernest Hemingway: “Another amateur theologian, Hemingway, said it's good if you feel good afterward, and bad if you feel bad afterward.”

Day Zero

Today is July 4, the day I leave for Dhamma Pakasa. I make a mental note not to bring writing materials with which to log my experience. Nor to bring reading material, intoxicants, cell phones, anything with which to listen to music, no medicine—not even ibuprofen. That leaves clothes, blanket, pillow, unscented deodorant and other toiletries and a checkbook. One of the most legit things about the Vipassana retreats is that you don’t pay until you’ve completed all ten days, at which point you make a donation of your own means that matches your desire to see other people undergo the wonderful, transformative Vipassana experience. Prepared to succeed, I’m also ready to give, or at least to become someone who gives. Because I imagine myself becoming enlightened, wise and giving upon departure on July 15.

“Vipassana” means “to see things as they really are. [It] is one of India's most ancient techniques of meditation. It was taught in India more than 2500 years ago as a universal remedy for universal ills, an Art of Living.”

Dhamma Pakasa is the Illinois center for Vipassana. There are many Vipassana centers. Dhamma Pakasa is a locale “surrounded by trees, grass and spring-fed ponds, the center provides a supportive atmosphere where one can learn the practice of Vipassana meditation… the courses [taught here] provide a unique opportunity to direct one's attention inward, and set about a process of inner discovery through direct experience.”

I call orientation day Day Zero because although not included as one of the ten days of the ten-day course, you really do start the night before Day One. First there’s registration, then a small dinner followed by noble silence and earnest commencement of the meditation course. Noble silence means that for ten days you don’t talk to anyone, except to the assistant teacher during allocated interview times. You don’t gesture, or write notes. Even eye contact is prohibited. (But it’s not like they throw you in Room 101 for infractions or have cameras in the bedrooms.)

I knew all this before arriving and had prepared. I hadn’t had alcohol since Memorial Day, my longest sober stretch since I had had my first drink about seven years ago. I meditated everyday for between 20-40 minutes throughout June and, since I knew I would be waking up at four a.m. from July 4-15, I started setting my (girlfriend’s) alarm for 6:00. I even did a work call at 6:30 a.m., which was unnecessary and pretty awesome. By Independence Day, I could wake-up naturally by 6:15, which, though not ideal, wasn’t bad either.

This meant I wasn’t much fun in June though. When my friend Brendan came to town, I would sit at the bar and watch him and other buddies drink. When my friend/housemate Jeremy moved to Cambodia, I had to sit at the party I helped organize and not drink and I left earlier than I would have otherwise. When my girlfriend Annalise’s friend Brittany visited from California, I was too busy to have fun as a tourist in my own town, tying up loose ends before eleven days incommunicado. Oh the humanity!

The point here is that I was prepared, dedicated, and diligent. Vipassana had been a tremendous experience for a couple acquaintances of mine, one of whom I consider to be serene, and I was ready to have a positive life-changing experience.

I got a ride there with two other attendees. The driver, Jedong, was a programmer for a finance company downtown. He was very generous, refusing to let me pay for gas. In the backseat was a Vipassana veteran, Nicole, an affable Nebraskan with pink hair. She had attended an identical retreat in a renovated elementary school in the Czech Republic while teaching English to pre-schoolers, which was a rewarding undertaking since prior to that she didn’t like kids. Vipassana was a positive “life-changing experience” for her. She also said that the first two days are very difficult, which is, incidentally, what everyone says, and added that the Dhamma Pakasa location sounded more hospitable than the dilapidated and crammed structure in middle Eastern Europe where she had received dollops of enlightenment. I imagined roaming wild dogs and a concrete pagoda.

The Vipassana Center in Illinois looks like the Branch Davidian compound, but cute. The dorm is a massive, unadorned brick thing: Waco. As we drove in, I saw a beaver run into a pond of lilies, seaweed and mysterious green froth: cute.

Dhamma Pakasa is surrounded by farm landscape, stretches of green and brown squares with some protuberances of hills with trees. The men and women—I think there are fourteen of each—are separated in the one dorm by a set of doors in the middle of the hallway. Paths of woodchips, gravel, pavement and wooden bridges lead to and from separate men’s and women’s entrances to the dorms, dining hall, and meditation hall. You walk your gender’s path to avoid seeing the other sex. A curtain separates the men from the women in the dining hall. This seems a little excessive, it’s not like you can hit on someone by impressing them with your noble silence, especially if she’s also looking downward, being nobly silent while plumbing her unconscious.

Noble silence doesn’t start until after dinner on Day Zero. I went to unload my clothes and toiletries into my room when I was pleasantly surprised to see that what I expected to be a double was actually two tiny singles with a shared bathroom. My bathroommate, Kyle, was a cool red-haired guy with a contagious laugh who liked meditation in theory—in books—and loved yoga in practice. I told him I’d try not to poop too much but if he had a problem otherwise he shouldn’t bother to contact me as that’d make us both ignobly forthcoming. He laughed contagiously.

We dined with this dude Viktor, a Brazilian who drove down from Denver. Another Vipassana alum (“the first two days are hard…it’s life-changing…bla bla bla”), like Nicole he seemed like someone I’d hang out with, though unlike Nicole he seemed a little less grounded. He related, in broken English, how high one feels after completing the retreat, something akin but manically unlike Nicole’s I-felt-like-a-million-dollars-upon-return story, more like: “I was driving home and felt high [gesture imitating puffing a joint], like I’d drive off the road….when I came home I told my ex-girlfriend I wanted to become a monk, she said I was crazy…I couldn’t sleep throughout the whole retreat, so I meditated at night…my previous roommate, at the end of the ten days, told me that at first he had hated me…my ex-girlfriend tried Vipassana meditation and it made her depressed, some people react this way.”

These didn’t seem like stories someone very wise would relate. Worse, it made me nervous his ex had had such a negative reaction. This was warning sign number one, that not all alum are necessarily on their way to the Buddha. Admittedly, judging Vipassana by its product should not be the only criteria. It is, after all, only natural and part of the philosophy that everyone will self-actualize in different ways depending on what emotions and levels of confidence and diligence they bring to the nirvanic table. It’s also absurd to expect all hang-ups to be magically eradicated in ten days. Furthermore, of the ten or so Vipassana alum I met, not one seemed uncool. On the other hand, it would be foolish to not question whether or not negative consequences could come of ten days of nothing but meditation and diving into the unconscious.

Warning sign number two was when Kyle and I started talking about drinking. Kyle mentioned he hadn’t drank for years, and I said that although I hadn’t imbibed in 36 days and counting, I was also counting the days until July 15 and had been building a mental list of the bars me and my girlfriend were going to hit up upon my departure, to which Kyle responded “Oh, you won’t want to do that!” and Viktor agreed: “You won’t want anything toxic after this.” And because that seemed to make sense, I was disturbed. You see, I don’t have an alcohol problem, but I like grabbing a beer with friends. I don’t want to be brainwashed into unnecessary prudishness, thinking that breath and the present moment is all one needs. Would sex be toxic too? What about fun? Or of just doing things? I had a fleeting vision of doctors putting down their tools to contemplate their growing compassion for brain tumors.

Kyle, Viktor, and I kept talking over dinner, which was bowls of split pea and some vegan cornbread. Now the two acquaintances of mine who had liked this retreat, who had introduced me to it and helped convince me to go, were both like “the food’s amazing, and you’ll think about it a lot as your mind wanders during meditation.” I’m just gonna fast forward three meals to say right here that the food is not that great. For breakfast, there was oatmeal, dates, prunes, and cereal. Lunch was vegan burgers and spiced-up-but-undercooked fries. Dinner: fruit, milk and tea, though for returners like Nicole and Viktor it’s just tea and lemon water. Is this really “amazing”? Maybe I’ve become a snob living with my chef girlfriend. Or, might it be possible that my friends had been so sensually deprived as to be enthralled by gruel and prunes? Smells like raw vegan meat for Occam’s Razor.

Again, maybe it’s just me, because Kyle’s face is in his soup bowl, turning for air to talk like taking breaths while swimming laps: “Your friends were right, the food here’s great!”

Part Three

It’s odd to think that as I write all this Jedong, Nicole, Kyle, Viktor, and Riban are probably meditating in the great hall, listening to Goenka tapes. Twenty bucks one of them has fallen asleep. I never fall asleep while meditating, but during each of the group sessions I went to I could hear about five or six people sniffling and someone else loudly, hilariously, distractingly snoring.

We are introduced to both Goenka and Riban after dinner, when they pull the curtain in the dining hall and noble silence commences. Riban lives in the meditation hall and is our assistant teacher. Our actual teacher is S.N. Goenka (pronounced “Gwen-kah,” I think), the Vipassana founder quoted above. Half of Riban’s job is to meditate with us and to press play on a CD player that pushes Goenka through the hall’s surround-sound speakers. “Goenka does most of the teaching,” admits Riban. Riban is a “populated place” in Gjirokastër, Albania and a Nigerian language but I can’t find much about its genealogy as a name. Despite my knowledge that all teachers have trained directly under Goenka for at least a year, and despite my distaste for stereotyping, I admit I was slightly disappointed when Riban turned out to be white.

The dimly lit meditation hall is actually an unadorned, uninspiring McMansionish living room with 28 blue mats and covered windows. Goenka talks to us from the disk as if he’s really there, just like Tae Bo, giving us instructions for self-improvement in ten lessons in ten days.

Prior to starting the meditation, Riban, Kate (more absurdly friendly and wonderful Vipassana staff), and the recordings of Goenka and of some other guy go over and over the rules pertaining to noble silence and other regulations, all of which had also been handed-out in a “Code of Discipline” pamphlet that Kyle joked he’d probably read ad nauseum while here. Outside of noble silence you are also not allowed to kill any being, steal, engage in sexual activity, take in intoxicants, or lie. I take it no sex meant no jerking-off since it was hard to have sex with everyone practicing noble silence and whatnot, and that no killing meant not so much not killing a fellow meditator, since there are already federal laws against that, but not killing beavers. Or flies. I had, in fact, almost killed a fly on the first day, and as my hand was about to hit the vegan cornbread, I remembered…Don’t kill any being, Charles. To avoid lying, I threw out pens I had accidentally brought, even though I had nothing to write on aside from Kleenex, because I felt it violated the “don’t bring any writing materials” rule and that even possessing them would be lying, which would erode the foundation of practice. I was surprised they served coffee. Caffeine was another intoxicant from which I had weaned myself in preparation for observation of the no intoxicants rule.

“There are two parts to the dorm in our compound [emphasis mine],” said either Kate or Riban, re-affirming the bad vibes regarding becoming something I didn’t want to become while at Dhamma Pakasa.

“Although you are free to leave at any time, it is potentially dangerous to do so before the ten days are up,” said the tape recording of the very white guy who wasn’t Goenka. This also made me nervous. Were they going to gas us on Day Four or something?

The voice of Goenka then came through the speakers of the “hall.” It’s a deep, beautiful, soothing, encouraging, adverbial, repetitive and ridiculous voice. S.N. Goenka sounds like everything I’d imagine a booming Indian guru to sound like, with an added bonus of deep, divine amphibian gurgling noises. An Asian James Earl Jones, if you will, teaching us how to focus on our breath.

“Pay tension to the bref [deep toad gurgle]. Stay attentive, bealerrrrt. Be ALERT! bealerrrf. Dealajantly. Patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistentlyyyyyyyy.”

I actually came up with the title for this blog post when I kept thinking Goenka was urging close attention to the desperation, which ended up not being very hard to do.

“Pay clohz tension to desperation, bery

clohz

attentionnnnnnnn [dtg].”

Goenka opens each group meditation session with chants that we are encouraged not to dismiss as blind ritual, but what else can you do since they are in Hindi? For those who don’t know me, I can’t speak Hindi. The insistence on these chants as not being blind ritual is a little futile, at least for me, since they aren’t translated. The best I could do was treat it like mood music that is fully comprehensible for some but not for me. It’s kinda like how some Americans are inexplicably infatuated with French rap.

At home, back in my wonderful home in Chicago where I can listen to music, eat meat, sleep seven hours at night, read, learn French…oh the addictions, how they pile up!...back home I would meditate in a chair because when you’re six feet and not athletic you are inflexible. I’m six-four and suck at any sport that involves my legs, like anything involving running, aerobics, or gymnastics.

Here’s something deceptive on the Dhamma Pakasa website’s FAQ…

Q: I can’t sit cross-legged. Can I meditate?

A: Certainly. Chairs are provided for those unable to sit comfortably on the floor because of age or a physical problem.

So the not-fine print is that I’m neither crippled nor old, so woe is me. It’s kind of absurd and embarrassing to be the only healthy person in a chair. Instead, I sit Indian style, and after twenty minutes my left leg falls asleep and after forty my back is strained and my legs feel like they’ll snap hard at the thighs, like peanut brittle. The session is an hour long.

“Pay tension at the knowstrillllll. Jus the knowstril and the knowstril pahsahgeway.”

At the end comes three minutes of chants, which would be killer had I not given up and shifted my legs already. Finally recorded Goenka commands, “Go rest…Go. Go rest.”

(As if I needed him to tell me twice.)

Riban presses stop and we head to bed at 9:30, ready to wake up at 4. Normally, it’ll let out at 9. We are to wake up at 4 everyday.

That’s 6.75 hours of sleep eleven nights straight, at best. But don’t assume the best, especially on Night Zero. I felt a lot of fear, call it Acapulco cliff-ledge vertigo, the thought I was actually going to go through with it. This fear, plus an imperfectly adjusted sleep schedule, plus fireworks and caps and other dumb Fourth of July shit, and consequent dog barking from neighboring farms, kept me up well past 11.

So I looked out the window a bit. I had a view of a cornfield, trees, and some sky. A fleet of fireflies hovered over the crops like a second set of stars--eye-level, neon, blipping in and out like radar. Combined with the translucent faded-blue smoke circles from faraway fireworks, it was quite the light show and probably the most pleasant part of my brief trip.

Part Four

Day One

I woke up at 4:22 and rushed down to the hall for group session one. Here’s the schedule: 4 wake-up and meditate until 6:30. 6:30 breakfast and rest. 7:30-8:30 group meditation. 8:30-11 meditation in your room or the hall. 11-Noon tea and rest. Noon-1:00 interviews with Riban, more rest. 1:00-2:30 meditation in your room or the hall. 2:30-3:30 group meditation. 3:30-5:00 meditation in your room or the hall. 5-6 tea break. 6-7 group meditation. 7-8 new lesson for next day’s practice. 8-9 group meditation in the hall. 9-9:30 get ready for bed to do it all again. That’s 13 hours of meditation, with some leftover waking hours for food and doing absolutely nothing.

Breakfast was oatmeal. Breakfast brought out for me the huge tease of practicing noble silence while surrounded by fellow makeshift monks. Like someone’s sitting at your table and you know his name, and everyone’s milling around, but you can’t make eye contact. And there’s all these little internal dilemma’s, like would holding the door for someone be an acknowledgment of his presence and thus a breach of noble silence?

Attending the Vipassana retreat is another beautiful example of the difference between factual knowledge and experiential knowledge. In Spanish they have conocer and saber, in French connaitre and savoir. In English we only have one verb for “to know” and the etymology of gnosis, like an agnostic who hasn’t “experienced knowledge of God.” So the point here is I had “saber” knowledge of meditating all day prior to my arrival; I knew what I was getting into, but I hadn’t developed practical, “conocer” knowledge. My friends and I had discussed my going to meditate everyday for ten days, saying things like “Boy, you’re just gonna meditate all day, won’t you get bored har har har.”

It’s a world of difference to actually go through this schedule. I had already meditated for two hours this morning and now that breakfast was done, it was time for….group meditation. After this meditation session, I went to my room to meditate. By now, I’ve meditated at least five hours. Time for lunch and break. What can you do during break? Nothing. Read your deodorant label. Think about how you’d rather be at home. Think about how it’s potentially dangerous to leave early. Meditate.

Then comes the afternoon shift, which is four hours. First you meditate, either in your room or in the hall. After this accomplishment, you…meditate. Finally, when you’re through with meditation, it’s time to meditate. Then comes tea, some fruit, and more meditation.

I was bored and lonely and had never been more sick of myself. Was this just a difficult day? Too difficult? Not the right way for me to learn? I tried to get back to thinking about the air in my nasal passageways.

I was one of six guys who interviewed with Riban during the allocated time slots at lunch that first day.

I sat in-front of the be-spectacled thirty-something guru with the grizzled and brown beard-moustache combo.

“I feel lots of fear,” I told him.

Riban smiled like he really felt for me, probably because he did. I immediately liked Riban a lot, forgot my stereotypes, and became heartened by the Vipassana product.

“Fear of what?”

He radiated loving energy. You had to be there.

I started bumbling over my list of grievances: “Well, like I’m not sure I should be here…I’m afraid that I won’t be able to finish the course…I’m also afraid that I can’t leave because it’s dangerous….And I miss my life, I miss doing things I normally do….I’m afraid of not falling asleep…and I miss my girlfriend, like, TTHHHHHHHHHHHHISSSSSSSSSS [all caps to try to capture gesture of hands separated by length of armspan] much.”

Riban’s reply was basically: “Well, Day One’s very hard. You can always leave, it’s not like the compound’s on lock down. Try to fight any drowsiness. We say it’s dangerous because we go deep into the unconscious mind and to leave early is quite a shock when you interact with the outside world again. You can use a chair if your legs hurt.”

Riban was one chill guru and I went to my afternoon meditation with slightly renewed enthusiasm. For the first time in my life, that afternoon, from 1-2, I sat in meditation with my legs crossed the whole time and my back straight. I didn’t fidget nor open my eyes too much, and though the pain prevented me from having what I would call a good session (focusing on my breath for at least half the time), it was still a personal accomplishment.

I’m used to rewarding myself after an accomplishment, or at least resting-up for a minute. Instead, it was off to the great hall for more cross-legged meditation, after which would follow some meditation back in the room, which I resolved to do sitting upright on the edge of my mattress, as a reward.

After two minutes of sitting with my legs comfortably in front of me, Riban enters. I crossed my legs again and made my back and neck straight. It hurt. (By the way, I know that you can’t injure yourself from sitting Indian style, that it just hurts after awhile.) Riban says you shouldn’t use a chair if you don’t need to because you could fall asleep, that pain is to be expected, but I don’t buy this because I don’t fall asleep while meditating—unless, I suppose, some gong wakes me up at four the fuck in the morning.

Goenka’s doing the pay-attention-to-the-respiration rigmarole when a bomb is dropped: “Your mind will wahnderrrrrrrrrrr. This is it’s abitpaturn. You are training your mind out of its abitpaturn. [long pause]. If your mind wanders for one minute, two minutes, five minutes…dis is fine, for the first day. If your mind wanders for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twennnnty minitz, den take some intentionul, louder brevssss.”

Five minutes? Hey Goenka, try more like 20 seconds! When I meditate on my own for, say, thirty minutes, usually half of the time I am successfully focused on my respiration and my mind very rarely walks off for two minutes at a time. Then I remembered that when I first started meditating about a year ago, how my mind would wander 5-15 minutes at a time. I felt kinda like that onion article, “I Am the Serenest, Yoga Master Gloats.”

As you can guess, this first glob of encouragement made my mind wander for 5-15 minutes, further encouraging me to leave (my meditation’s actually getting worse!).

But I felt like I had enough will to make it through one day; after all, I was just about finished with Day One, half of the two days that are the hardest. I would sleep more tonight, I’m sure. I could stay and pray that a rhythm and habit would develop, but what if it didn’t? Could I really make it two days? Four? Ten? It’s more dangerous to leave later, because by then you’ve spent more time away from the world and in your own unconscious. So far, we’d only done respiration for one day. The coast was still clear.

I had come here to become better at meditation, to get some formal training. And I was getting some good stuff. I also wanted to practice a lot, kind of detox and gain perspective. I was getting that too, but was this the best way for me to accomplish these goals? What else would I accomplish? Would I still be a fun person when I left this? Riban, for example, seemed cool, content and very wise, but I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with him. He didn’t seem like much fun. Should that matter? And since I’m thinking about people I respect, like Riban, most of my heroes never attended meditation retreats, as far as I’m aware. I was either resisting powerful positive change or minor brainwashing. Either way, the deprivation seemed severe.

Because by this point my legs were positively killing me. If I wanted to, I could have ripped them off like rotisserie chicken pieces. I’m looking forward to returning to my room, to meditating in privacy, in a chair, maybe falling asleep, to treating myself like I’m old and disabled. Start chanting, Goenka, you fuck! Finally the incomprehensible but assuredly warm-hearted Hindi blessings arrive, churning through the speakers like end credits, and I’m loosened up and readied to depart when Riban speaks softly, “Let’s take a short break, then I’d like to ask the new students to stay and meditate here in the group meditation hall.” This meant more time with crossed legs, fear, and doubt. After this would be tea and four more hours of meditation, in the hall no less.

Something snapped in my mind. Or more like some voice entered, looked at all the positive meditative energy radiating all around me and said “this is some bullllllshit, right here.”

I went up to Patrick, the male student manager, and told him I was ready to go. He was super-nice, we talked for five minutes outside. A fly flew onto his cheek and walked around there while I explained why I wanted to leave, and he didn’t brush it off and I was impressed, but still…

Patrick, like Riban, understood my plight but didn’t want me to leave. It’s hardest on the first day, yadda yadda. He said I could meditate in the hall for about forty minutes, then hang out in my room for a half-hour and after that talk with Riban at five when everyone else was having their sumptuous supper of fruit and tea.

So that’s what I did. After sitting for another forty minutes, I went back to the room and began packing. Kyle was asleep next door, and I had heard him snoring in the morning. I could really empathize and was heartened to know that I wasn't the only one who felt worn out and was breaking the rules. Day One had, thus far, been the longest day of my life since pulling all-nighters writing pointless essays in college, and I had only been awake for twelve hours. I went to the bathroom to grab my toiletries when I saw a fly on the inside of the bowl. Mindlessly, I flushed the toilet, realizing only too late that I had killed another being. I had eroded the foundation. This just about clinched it.

Riban asked what was up, I said I was ready to go. “Life takes lots of twists and turns,” he said. Indeed, escapes too. We parted on good terms.

Because I was heading out, I could eat an actual dinner (not just fruit) in the kitchen, where I met another set of extremely nice and gracious Vipassana vets who fed me some great rice stuff. What were they holding out for? Was I making the wrong decision? Maybe I should just put away my pride and sit in a chair. Riban said that’d be okay.

On the bus ride back, talking to surprised family members on the phone, I knew I had made the right choice. I shuddered to think that everyone else was still back there meditating. This decision felt real good afterward, and I slept the most hours last night than I have in as long as I can remember.

Part Five

There’s no way around this, part of my departure was a straight-up will power issue. I had left on the first day, a big willpower no-no. On the “rest” breaks I thought to myself: give me one thing, just one. A book. A nightly phone call. Music. A pen and paper. A book or newspaper. All I have is the daily schedule, code of discipline, and the shampoo bottle label, and I’ve read all these already and they aren’t very interesting. Just one thing. Something to allow me to breathe.

I’m not saying that they’re doing it wrong there, but this isn’t the way for me. The grade is too steep. It’s supposed to be like rehab, I guess, but for things I think are okay to be addicted to.

Then I realized something pretty profound: my life is great. It’s not like my life is some sort of bad dream. I got a wonderful girlfriend of 2.75 years, all my family members are alive and intact, my work situation is just fine, I like the neighborhood in which I live and love the city that contains it, and I’m about to live near Place Stanislas “la plus belle place du monde.” I have hang-ups, yes, but so does everyone, and my states of physical and mental health are both pretty strong. And I just found out that the school at which I will be teaching in France is providing free housing, which means lots of unexpected, leftover dough. And I’m putting the final touches onto the start of a killer retirement plan.

True, if my eyes are just now opening to the things I took for granted, good meditation combined with ten times the length of deprivation may have ultimately served to keep them open longer. That is part of the point of meditation, part of being happy in the present moment. Still, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t letting myself down by leaving, and as I write all this I feel re-affirmed. This wasn’t so much an issue of willpower, I know what those feel like. Willpower was part of a larger problem: that the effort put in wasn’t worth such vague output and that Day One was my only chance to run for it. It was a tricky balance and I had to decide one way or another if I was going to make it back to Chicago that night. If I can allow myself to trust myself as much as I did yesterday, I will be a much better person for it.

At times, above, I make Vipassana seem like a cult. It is not. The sanity and logic of its philosophy are beautiful and what attracted me to it in the first place. Imagine the opposite of dianetics. I just think you gotta badly want the goal, because the world really doesn’t exist there. If someone meditated about 2-3 hours daily and wanted to learn more, I would recommend Vipassana. Kyle, my bathroommate, dabbled with yoga and claimed to rabidly read Eastern philosophy. I am confident that he also came to the right place for him and that there is a good chance the retreat will be a positive experience. I, however, could have ended up like Viktor’s ex-girlfriend.

I was quite scared of becoming something I didn’t want to become, and this is only partly fear of change. Although it’s a huge exaggeration to say Vipassana is brainwashing, the entire deprivation of everything except Goenka’s teaching for 240 straight hours, most of which time you’re awake, and such an emphasis on surrender to the Buddha made me feel uneasy. Again, I’m not judging. I’m really not. Everyone there was very nice and had nothing to gain aside from happiness in my success. I just don’t think I could succeed best this way, nor could I be assured that I wanted to succeed. All I wanted was some formal training, perspective, and enhanced capacity for present-moment awareness and the other benefits expounded upon at the beginning of this awfully long blog post. I fulfilled the first task--I am confident as never before that I know how to meditate. I’ll look elsewhere for my other goals.

I also grew some invaluable confidence by leaving: I cultivated my belief that my individual decisions are right for me. I think my two biggest shortcomings are over-care for what other people think about me and impatience. Meditation practice, which will continue in a new form, addresses the latter and departing Vipassana felt like addressing the former. I’m the type who always wants his ideas, works, and accomplishments approved by friends, family and other esteemed people. Hence, I blog. When I decided to leave, Riban asked me not to leave, and to leave against the entreaties of someone who I had come to immediately respect as quite wise, wiser than me, was very difficult. I also knew some people back home seemed vicariously interested in my attempt and that to leave early would let them down and perhaps bring me heaps of embarrassment. I write this partly because I feel I owe an explanation for re-entering the world so soon.

I have time to re-evaluate myself, what with my email auto-responder on until the 15th. I’m still on vacation. I probably won’t unrelinquish my obligations for a couple days. I’ll continue to meditate everyday, applying new things I’ve learned, and I’ll try to eat healthy, like I was going to on the retreat, though I’ll probably pass on the peanut butter and chutney sandwich I had prepared for myself on Day One.

There’s a Nietzsche line, something like if a man has figured out a why, he can endure any how. I do not have that why yet, and I think I need to keep searching. Possibly it’s another path that involves meditation. Possibly not. On the other hand, there are a few people in the world I would die for and maybe six or seven others for whom I would give everything short of death. Perhaps this thought on self-sacrifice charts to some philosophical fun, perhaps it’s just love as what Mos Def defines as the dangerous necessity. What would I be if one of the few people super-close to me did die? If the answer’s nothing, are they too close?

In conclusion, Day Zero and Day One at Dhamma Pakasa may have been two of the most important in my whole life. More questions were raised than answered, and I didn’t expect that. But then I hadn’t expected a sudden and confused confrontation against limits of strength and of ideas I hold dear. I either hit a wall or went through one. Time will tell. I feel heartened and yet full of doubt just experientially knowing what it means that the Dhamma Pakasa Vipassana facility exists. That somewhere, at an extreme cornfield not far from this coffeeshop, a smidgeon of this world is happily opting out of turning.