This is Part 2 of my notes from the 48-hour silent meditation retreat. You can read Part 1 here. This is a series of observations from the retreat.
No phones. No books. No TV. No talking.
I feared what it would unleash. Would I go down dark rabbit holes? What if one of my parents wanted to reach me for an emergency?
What if there was a nuclear standoff and my sane voice is the only way to stop it? A couple go to a silent meditation retreat and come back to a world annihilated by nuclear fallout.
As it turned out, the world continued spinning just fine without my lordly presence.
Not exactly right. My world changed the moment I handed over my phone. It receded like a tide, taking all the flotsam of noise, news, content, pings, messages, and anxieties with it. It was just me now, standing on the quiet sandbank of an empty beach of life.
My worries got a lot narrower. I was feeling hot and fantasizing about air conditioners. I was thinking about how sweaty and sticky I was. I was hyper-aware of mosquitos (there weren’t many thankfully) while spraying myself with repellant. I was listening and cataloging bird sounds.
Bangkok seemed far away. Global problems seemed even farther away.
It’s liberating when your span of worries narrows. The 24/7 connectivity and the unending stream of information and content is a prison. It expands your span of worry to include the entire world. No wonder we’re all going raving mad.
I wish governments declared a holiday for the internet every week or so. The entire world takes a breath and touches grass or something.
The heat and sweat
“Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.”
― George Carlin
Throughout the weekend, temperatures steadily remained upwards of 34 degrees with the minimum being 27 degrees (presumably at 4 am). And there were no fans.
Our first exposure to our meditation guide was through a rather passive-aggressive action. On Friday evening, as we sat in the meditation hall waiting for the first session to begin, we all felt the heat. Naturally, a confident Russian woman decided to turn on the fan on the women’s side of the hall followed by another confident Russian man doing the same on the men’s side.
This annoyed me a bit. I am not entirely sure whether it was the refusal to even be this uncomfortable when coming to a place like this or the fact that this felt like a weird power display.
The meditation teacher rose, walked calmly to each of these two fans, and turned them off.
“I think we can live without it for these three days,” he said.
He’d administered a small slap without raising his hands. And that is how it was for the next three days. No breeze or wind stirred anything in the area.
I sweat. I mean, my body is just a constant salty waterfall. Through the weekend, my t-shirts were always heavy and wet, and at some point, given my poor hydration, even that stopped.
The beauty, though, was by Sunday I had gotten used to it. I no longer felt like I couldn’t breathe and while I was sticky all the time, I believed that I could live with this instead of thinking ‘Oh shit, I am going to melt in this heat’.
This was amazing because I am someone who has the air conditioner running at 22 degrees to be comfortable. I may have trained myself to need cooler and cooler temperatures when instead I should be preparing myself for a warming world the other way around.
On Sunday evening, when the retreat was over, N and I went to get a foot massage and upon entering the shop, the first blast of air conditioner hit us after 48 hours. I think I orgasmed.
Sleep? What sleep?
“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
The first night, I didn’t sleep a wink. It was lights out at 8.30 PM after which we all shuffled away to our respective dorm rooms. In the dark, the room looked even more forlorn. The only signal to wake up in the morning would be a gong that would ring at…4.30 am.
The room was stifling in the night too. I rolled around in the bed, sweaty thighs stuck together, in woozy heat exhaustion.
The timeless, sleepless, dark of a new place is a strange limbo. It was deathly quiet, except for the forest sounds. Crickets, owls, and other assorted night creatures grunted and buzzed. Deep into the night, I saw something dark (a bat?) fly into the room, zip around, and then fly out through the window (hole in the wall). In the light of the morning, I wondered if it was real or hallucinated.
I could also hear the occasional sounds from fellow dorm-ies. Every time someone turned in their bed, every sigh, every creak, and every movement was projected and amplified. For all that, it was surprisingly quiet. No one farted.
The strange incident of the missing participant
“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
― Bram Stoker
In the middle of the first night (I have no clue of the time in that dark limbo), I heard movement from the neighboring cubicle. This was followed by my neighbor’s voice, “What the hell!”
Did a snake crawl into his room? Or was it a scorpion? We had been warned about some of these in a session earlier this evening. And I wasn’t sleeping.
Lights came on his cubicle which in turn meant half the dorm was flooded with light. I could hear him shuffling around. “What is that?” he said and repeated it a few times, less panicked and more curious. Five minutes later he’d turned off the lights and gone back to sleep.
Now, I’d have dismissed this as an incident not worthy of mention except for the fact that the man did not turn up for meditation sessions the next day. It’s quite possible he just left unable to take the single night he spent there but that’s a boring explanation.
What strange sight did he see in the middle of the night? Is he missing and no one cares? Was he silenced? The conspiracy needs uncovering.
The melancholy of your thoughts
“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I had three feelings I constantly lived with during the retreat:
Calm
Boredom
Melancholy
I had moments of complete peace, especially during some of the meditation sessions. On Saturday night, we were allowed to meditate by ourselves outside. I sat by the temple on the hill, looking up at a gloriously packed night sky full of stars in utter quiet. Sheer calm and bliss.
There were moments of utter boredom. Boredom made me restless but there was nothing to do. Time crawled, especially during my solo moments. I’d imagine a whole random story in my mind and then look up and see that only ten minutes had passed. (there was a clock in the dining hall, meditation hall, and in the temple).
I’ve complained about the years moving too fast - perhaps boredom is the answer.
Then there was the melancholy. With no stimulation, unable to speak, and left to my thoughts, it felt like loneliness. I didn’t resist it but instead just sat with it.
It’s not exactly sadness but there is a bit of that. It’s not exactly longing but there’s a bit of that too. It’s a bit of nostalgia and a bit of existential angst. I think the closest way to describe it is using the Russian word Toska.
“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”― Vladimir Nabokov
I think when left to ourselves, with zero stimulation, we all eventually gravitate to it. As Louis C.K. says here, we do not want to live with our void too long and the phone is a perfect distraction.
Perhaps we all need to live in it a little. There is something beautifully sad about being a human.
I found my Wilson in a water bottle
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
When you’re silent for three days, have no distractions, can’t talk to anyone or do anything and the only thing you carry around with you all the time is a small water bottle, you rapidly develop an attachment to it to weird levels. At least I did.
Like everyone, I too carried the bottle with me everywhere (when walking around, while meditating, while dining), a tiny 330 ml bottle I got on the flight to Koh Samui.
Chuck Noland had a Volleyball. I had a water bottle. On day 2, I briefly lost it (left it behind) in the temple and had genuine separation anxiety for the duration of a meditation session. The moment it was over, I walked back to pick it up straight away.
I learned that the Japanese have a word for this too. Tsukumogami are tools that have attained a soul or spirit. The little water bottle became my Tsukumogami.
I do wonder if this is why people developed greater attachment to objects before social media and constant distraction because they shared moments of quiet melancholy with it. Think back to the TV, a Refrigerator, or a Car owned by your parents and you’ll know what I am talking about.
Last meal at lunch
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The one benefit of not giving your body any kind of habit to work with is that I can happily switch my meal habits and not skip a beat. I don’t eat breakfast in Thailand (haven’t for the last 4 years) but can eat a proper South Indian full-meals lunch at 10.30 am when visiting my parents. When in Bengaluru, I cannot resist a morning breakfast (the vada beckons). My stomach shrugs and carries on.
During the retreat, we ate only two meals for the two days. The last meal was lunch. The food was simple vegetarian fare - a broth, rice or noodles, salad, a boiled egg and a fruit. We were handed a single bowl and everything went into it. It was delicious!
Missing dinner did not seem to be an issue at all when I went to bed in the night having eaten the last meal nearly seven hours before and with the prospect of the next meal only at 9 am the next morning. I wasn’t hungry.
I did have a mild headache the entire time though and I may be wrong about everything I said in this section before.
The couple-gravitational-pull
“Take my hand and we'll make it - I swear”
― Bon Jovi
There were about 7 couples in the retreat. Before the retreat began, we were asked to refrain from communicating or acknowledging each other.
Of these seven couples, three of us were very well-behaved. N, the rule follower that she was, went out of her way to refuse to acknowledge me, despite my attempts to break her.
But not all of them were well-behaved.
On day one, I could see the couple-gravitational-pull in full action. At least four different couples would walk together, sit together, and just hang around each other when we had free time. It was amusing to watch and they were separated out by one of the coordinators around.
But there was one terrible couple that not only spent all their free time together but they’d whisper, hold hands, and go off on walks like they were at a resort. Despite being pried apart and asked not to do it multiple times, they just kept at it.
Why even come to something like this to begin with?
Men can bond without a word being spoken
“A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Any real male friendship I have formed is by being part of something together. In college, the friends I found were living in the same dorm. When I worked in consulting, it was when we traveled together on work. My best childhood friends were those I played cricket with every day.
I have a hypothesis that men need to engage in a shared hobby, mission, or problem to make real friendships. Could be sport, work, art, building things, a shared problem to solve, or something. I haven’t made a single male friend by just meeting him for brunch regularly.
Maybe it's just me.
What was strange to see was a bond forming between the men in the group in the retreat even without a word being spoken. Among the 47 participants, there were only 18 men so it was a smaller group.
In twenty-four hours, we were acknowledging each other with smiles and sharing little titbits without speaking. Like the guy next to me indicating an effective cushion-usage strategy to sit longer on the ground or the dude brushing next to me pointing to a large spider on the wall as a ‘be careful’. We continued brushing staring at it as it slithered into some nook.
Surprisingly, the men flocked more than the women. When the gong rang in the morning, all the men would assemble pretty much within the same five-minute interval whereas there was wider dispersion amongst the women (some came very early and some late).
It made me wonder: Are men conditioned to bond only when doing something together?
Is meditation for me?
“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
I always liked spending time in my head. Maybe a little too much.
During the quiet solo times, I could entertain myself. But I was a terrible meditator.
In most of the sessions, my mind was very active when I was asked to come back and be mindful. To be fair, the goal of meditation isn’t to stop thoughts but ruminations. Thoughts are fine. “Thoughts gave us penicillin,” in the words of the meditation guide (actually, that was more of an accident). Ruminations are the dark broodings about the past or the future, which have no value and are just detrimental.
I do not ruminate much. This is mostly luck, I guess. So, I felt like I’d rather sit during the meditation sessions and think about things because it felt more entertaining. It felt like I was cheating at meditation. Made me wonder if the vipassana or mindfulness-style meditation is for me.
The meditation style that I liked was walking meditation, which is exactly as it sounds. You focus on each movement, every press of your feet, the lifting, the moving, and the way your center of gravity shifts as you take the next step. It felt like ‘flow’. I could see myself doing this more.
Everyone’s trying to figure things out, including your meditation guide
“We become aware of the void as we fill it.”
― Antonio Porchia
Our meditation sessions were led by this French guy called Pierre. On our first session, Pierre told us that he was an introvert and these sessions where he was in front of a lot of people took a lot out of him. His voice was mellifluous and his occasional French pronunciation of certain English words (Idee for Idea) was delightful.
I also liked the fact that he didn’t go deep into religion and instead pulled in references from modern psychology to explain ideas.
His contention was this:
The ultimate purpose of meditation was to lose the idea of a self. What we think of as ‘self’ is non-existent. It’s an artificial projection. Our brains cook up the story as if we are seeing the world from ‘our’ eyes but there isn’t a self. There isn’t free will and every action can be easily explained.
The ultimate goal of meditation is the killing of the self.
He conceded that people have meditated for decades and haven’t been able to leave that notion on the side. This is where he believed he differed from traditional practitioners. Meditation guides and monks won’t bring up the notion of “no self” soon enough believing that you need to go through the journey slowly so you can get to it. Instead, he believed that students of meditation should be introduced to the idea of no-self quickly enough and continue to work towards it as everything else is just a temporary step.
It all felt a bit too esoteric for me but I enjoyed some of the meta commentary about no free will. This is one of my favorite thought exercises.
What was interesting for me was the moments where I got to see him exhibit momentary wistfulness or what sounded like mild regret when talking about his father, or having chosen this path (and not pursuing a career), or the occasional snide remarks about certain revered traditions.
It was refreshing and I am glad he talked about it like a normal human rather than pretend like he was above it all. It drove home a key point.
There is no end point of ultimate peace or elevated being. Everyone will take a journey and every choice will have things you miss, regret, and wish for.
It was a weirdly comforting thought.
Could be Worse
Tyag