Vipassana Meditation: Part II

Part I in case you missed it and want to start from the beginning...

Day 3 – I began to make up personalities about the other people who were taking the course with me. Without the ability to talk or gesture or make eye contact, you just had to assume a lot about people if you wanted to give them any sort of identity. I determined that I thought roommate #2 was really pretentious and didn’t like me. I was dead wrong about this. He turned out to be a very nice humble guy. I was kind of annoyed by anyone else in the class who would breathe loudly or make lots of noise in the meditation hall. I felt like they had no social awareness and I wished that they would learn how to be still and silent so that everyone else could focus on their meditation. It turned out that by Day 5 everyone had gotten pretty good at doing this and found a way for themselves to be comfortable (and silent!) during the class.

I thought about sex for about the entire third day. I sat through an entire meditation session not thinking about anything at all except for the most depraved raunchy sexual things I could think of. I tried to control my brain to think about what we were practicing, observing sensation. Nothing worked, sex was all my brain wanted to think about. I tried to simplify and go back to day one’s breathing practice. Nope, sex. My thoughts went all over the place but always with a sexual twist. I was starting to get really worried about what long stretches I could continue to think about these thing and all the scenarios I was imagining. My brain just couldn’t get enough. So eventually I just let it. I let it run and said you can think about whatever it is you want to think about until you get it out of your system. It took most of the day and into the evening. I made very little progress on my meditation practice. At 8pm Goenka’s nightly discourse put some more useful thoughts in my head and rejuvenated my inspiration and I was finally able to focus for the final night session. Then something amazing happened.

I was in a pretty good meditation and forgetting completely about any pain in my back and not thinking about sex at all. I was thinking about the impermanence of everything in the world including myself while focused on a specific sensation. I was actually feeling what felt like my atoms, or at least my cells and this very fine subtle vibration. It felt like there was an electric current running through me that I was just now realizing was there. Then there was a jolt! It made my body move ever so slightly and it sounded like there was a little pop or a click inside my head. It felt like I had just changed air pressure and my ears had popped. But the most striking thing was what looked like a lightening streak that I could see with my closed eyes. It came from in my brain and the image went from the top left side of the brain down across the hemispheres to the bottom right part of my brain. I was actually able to still see the strike or electricity pattern two months after it happened anytime I tried to visualize it. When it happened I had just thought about the idea of impermanence and how everything is always moving and changing, and I associated it with this current-like vibration as the physical realization of this fact. It was an amazing powerful connection of ideas and all the sudden it felt like everything in the universe was connected and my brain had just figured it out. This was a eureka moment, an amazing epiphany! I understood the teaching and so much more.

There was a wonderful feeling of euphoria that accompanied this and a huge smile came over me. My whole body was happy. I sat there trying to remain composed so that I wouldn’t be a distraction to everyone else in the group. But this was amazing. A minute or so later the class ended and I was getting really giddy. I got up quickly and was the first to leave the room. I had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep myself from laughing aloud, though I think I was actually making some laughing noises as I walked along the path back to the dormitory. I couldn’t feel my feet. I laid down in bed but it was difficult. I was far too excited about what this connection was and what I meant. I wanted to tell everyone I knew about what just happened. At that point I was half convinced I was a reincarnation of the Buddha. That I had figured things out and that my path to complete enlightenment was imminent. I took me about half an hour to get tired and fall asleep. Not only was my spirit through the roof, but so was my ego. I felt so very accomplished. So clearly I was quite a way from true enlightenment, but I was too happy to realize this.

I actually had a dream that night and I was laughing again and I woke up and I was actually laughing out loud. First of all it was a weird time to wake up but, my god, how embarrassing. My roommates are probably convinced that I’m the crazy one, laughing out loud in his sleep. (At the end of the course after the silence was broken I asked my roommates if they had heard me laughing and neither said they did so I guess I got away with that one). But it was still a marked case of my head inflating itself and then being humbled by how I might be viewed by someone else.

Day 4 – By this time we were now officially doing Vipassana which is the point where you start scanning through the different parts of your body to try and pick up sensation everywhere. All the previous stuff was just warm up exercises to help us prepare. This was really tough at first in some places. It became real work as my concentration and my patience were being tested more than ever. I had to prevent myself from getting antsy when I didn’t feel anything right away. After a couple minutes I would give up searching for sensation at a specific body part. My upper arms didn’t really seem to have too much feeling in them, nor did my abdomen. The top of my head was also difficult. So it would take a while for me to complete the body scan, close to an entire hour-long meditation session for just one cycle.

At some point in my contemplation on this day I came across what seemed to be a big problem. I was thinking about the process of wearing down sankharas. If I’m feeling all these sensations and remain equanimous it is definitely a good thing when I’m trying to break up all those deeply engrained sankharas. By cutting the cycle these cravings and aversion will begin to fade away. But overthinking it, as I will always do, I thought about any reasons that this would make me worse off. I mean, if this was such a simple process how come not everyone was doing it. The flaw was that I felt that I really liked some of my sankharas. Aren’t there behaviors and emotional responses which are productive? What about motivation? Where does that come from? I like it when I have desires to play music even though it isn’t the productive thing to do. I like my sexual desires because that is something important in my relationship. So I feared that if I continued this process to its logical conclusion I would end up a happy but unmotivated uninterested lazy lump, a monk basically. But I don’t want to be a monk. I want to see things, and do things, and accomplish things, and interact with people. I began to fear that I would just stop wanting everything and I would learn to not submit to any desires, be basic needs like hunger, sexual, the desire to earn money, achieve, do good, be successful, anything. I would instead just slowly phase myself further and further from modern society. I got the impression that this would just bring me to neutral, which is kind of plain and boring. Perhaps happy, but I’m already generally happy.

I made a drink analogy in my attempts to explain it better. So my life is a drink. It is mostly water based, but it has some elements of lemonade, and it has some mud in it as well. Since I generally considered myself a happy together person I said that I was mostly lemonade with a little bit of mud at the bottom which I taste sometimes when I get to the bottom of the glass. And yes, that is unpleasant, but all the lemonade makes it much easier to swallow and overall the drink is still sweet and delicious. Meditation then comes along as a filter. It filters out a percentage of the mud at the bottom, but it also filters out a lot of the lemon and sugar elements that make my drink really tasty. Through repetition of this process eventually you end up with pure clean filtered water. And while that is great and pure and all, it isn’t lemonade. Many people like lemonade more than filtered water.

It made terrific sense that if I was miserable then I would really benefit from meditation, because just about everyone prefers clean filtered water to muddy water, at least to drink. But if the sum of my current sankharas makes me a happy person then why should I bother trying to wear them down or filter them? Bringing me to neutral would be a net decrease in happiness.

This is something that troubled me throughout the rest of the course. Well, the truth of it, a conclusion that I only recently reached much later after the course and after some very long reflection, is that society sucks. Ok, well not completely, but there are so many societal constructs which suck. They take greed to achieve and produce misery.  There are many other great things that happen in society as well, but the things that create misery are inevitable. No matter how happy you try to be, nt matter how in love with life, or with someone else, you might happen to be for a period of time this misery will eventually suck you in and cause suffering. The only way to prevent that is to have a plan to deal with it beforehand, and this elimination of the root of the problem is the best plan I’ve come across.

So while yes, I was a very happy person at the time of my meditation retreat, it wasn’t permanent. The highs will almost certainly come back to earth. The best way to live is without attachment. That’s when you can experience real truth. There are many young philosophers who label themselves truth seekers. I have given myself that label a number of times. I really truly feel at this point that Vipassana meditation is a way to truth. It is a way to unlock the things you don't understand about your own head, it is a way to purify oneself from misery and confusion, and to understand and experience the reality of life which occurs in the actual subtle sensations where life, emotion, and all of human action is embedded. The point is to just give in and let yourself become immersed in this practice. I hadn’t fully realized that at the time and I assume it was just another example of the lazy dark side of my brain trying to derail all the wonderful things that my light side is always trying to do.

Day 5 – This day my brain was a little bit scattered and wanted to think of something to do that wasn’t meditation. I was also a little unsure of how much I should continue the practice for the problem that I encountered on Day 4 which I had yet to solve. I wanted something to think about, and since I had regularly been thinking about the Big Lebowski, I decided to take it to the next level. I just wanted to test my memory and see if I could reconstruct the whole movie in my head. I pretty much know how each scene goes, but I wanted to see if I could put them all in order, because it does have sort of a complex sequence. It took about an hour to fully sort out, and I did feel accomplished by the time I had finished and I could reply the whole movie in my head and still make myself laugh (definitely becoming a crazy person).

In doing this I realized that I had finally found a flaw in the plot and details of the Big Lebowski which has astonishing continuity. I will not discuss the detail of this problem in this post because it would seem out of place and off topic, but if anyone wants to know, I have it, just ask sometime.

Just as an aside here, I noticed that I had acquired a rather precise sense of time. When I was in the meditation sessions, even though I wasn’t thinking about it, I always seemed to know exactly how long I had been in there. It got to the point where I could anticipate within a matter of seconds when the instructors watch would make a very tiny beep indicating that the class was at its end, and then I would hear the sound of him pushing the play button on the CD player and Goenka’s voice would come on for a final prayer to end the meditation session. This carried into almost everything I did. If I was walking or thinking or sleeping I would always know rather accurately what time it was. I think this is just a testament to increased focus and awareness that comes with the awareness of living more in the present moment and not allowing your brain to get distracted by everything. 

Day 6 – I continued my practice and I was getting even better I was learning to move through the different parts of my body a little bit quicker than before and eventually I was beginning to feel sensations almost everywhere. But I still hadn’t solved my problem from Day 4 about whether or not I was destroying the Sankharas that I actually liked. So I decided to ask the instructor for help in solving the question. He wasn’t very helpful and was concerned about my distress.

“It sounds like you think that there is something that you are going to lose, you don’t lose anything through this, only bad habits,” he explained. Then I would explain it again, using the lemonade analogy. “I think you’re over thinking it.” “Of course I’m overthinking it, that’s what I do!” I told him. No avail. So I said that I was contemplating leaving because I didn’t need what the course was teaching me, but that I would sleep on it. My words proved to be quite appropriate as that night the events of my sleep took a dramatic turn and determined my fate…

Hold on to something while I tell this story, even thinking about it now I’m already getting tense, goosebumped, and emotional. I assure you this was a real experience and not made up in any way. I have to give this disclaimer because I have a hard time believing it sometimes.

After I had brushed my teeth and when I was ready to sleep I went into my room with my roommates already asleep and laid my head down on the pillow. I am a stomach sleeper and my head was turned to my left, with just a blank white wall in the mostly dark room to see in that direction, you know, if my eyes had been open. They weren’t. I was exhausted and ready to get some good sleep and let my mind truly rest so I could begin to tackle more problems in the morning. As I drifted toward sleep my mind began to have some visions. This is after mostly losing consciousness to sleep, and it is not unusual for me to have these while falling asleep. But the vision was particularly disturbing and frightening. I was envisioning that I was lying on a cot in the middle of a basement of a Vietnamese torture chamber. From the inside it was an older wood and brick building with a dirt floor. In the background was a stairway leading up to the ground level. But in the foreground, right next to me, was a Vietnamese man also lying on his stomach on a cot next to me. He was facing me and obviously in significant discomfort. I couldn’t see his legs as there was a support for the building obstructing, but it appeared that something was torturing him, and hurting him below his waist. He was calling out to me, yelling in Vietnamese. The volume was turned down but I couldn’t understand him anyway. But he really wanted my attention. Suddenly the fright of this image caused me to wake up and open my eyes to the blank white wall. But in my sight still was the Vietnamese man, still right next to me in bed, still yelling to me. The torture dungeon background had disappeared and I could see the blank white wall in the dark room of my dormitory. I was confused, and felt like I was doing something incorrectly, a “no, no, wait, there’s been some kind of mistake” feeling. So I closed my eyes again. I was back in the dungeon and the Vietnamese man is still trying to get my attention, he’s trying to warn me maybe, or passing on some final vital piece of information as he knows his time is running short. Open eyes. The wall of my room is behind him again. Close. Open. Close. Open. He’s still here!

Then a thought: wait, if I’m awake, then this isn’t a dream. My body froze and was swept with anxiety. Oh no. Hold on tight! As soon as the thought completed I felt like I really started to lose control. The shadows and corners of the room started to move inward and close in on me. They were coming for me. MY EYES ARE OPEN!! I AM AWAKE!! HOW IS THIS HAPPENING!!! Fear was taking over. I needed to do something. I quickly rolled over on to my back so I don’t have to look at the wall. I looked up at the ceiling. Things are flying at me. Evil things. Falling down from the ceiling. Everything that I’ve ever associated with evil. Images from the horror films, vaguely formed ghost and goblins. Bloody and gruesome things. I can barely see any of the room because so much is flying at me. They are right in front of me, swarming me. Some with sharp teeth and claws are biting at me. They make loud shrieks of terror over a large whirring sound. I can feel them scratching at my arms. They are touching my arms, my chest, my legs and pulling. I can physically feel it. I know they aren’t real, but I can’t ignore them. Trying to find the reality of the situation I thought to myself, “This is it, I have actually gone crazy. I’m seeing things that aren’t real.”

But I’m terrified. They want to take me down with them. Into the dark pits of hell, or evil or wherever these things come from. They want me. They want my brain to turn off. They want me to fall back asleep. I’m seeing murders, stabbings, assassinations, blood and guts, just horror. I’m too afraid to move anywhere. I look about the room for some help. I can see two beds with each of my roommates lying on them, fast asleep. They aren’t seeing any of this. The evil is here for me. The floor is covered with dead bodies. Like Khmer Rouge mass graves, but still fresh. I can see the bloody parts hanging out of the sheets some of the bodies were rolled in. There are skulls and bones. Further away I can see more murders going on. Throats are being slashed and blood is spilling out. I’m trying to fight it. This isn’t real!! It’s in my head. My heart is racing. My body is tense.

The evil feels that I’m fighting but it wants me to submit. It’s trying to exhaust me. It’s trying to pull me into sleep. It came out just before I fell asleep because it thought that was when my mind was at its weakest. That’s when it could successfully make its way into my conscious mind. It feels me fighting back now, starting to figure it out. But it’s not going quietly, it’s not done scaring me. It has something more it wants me to see.

Suddenly I’m watching myself paralyzed in bed from the middle of the room. My body is now possessed. My eyes look a heavy red and black and cannot focus, they just stare blankly forward doing whatever the evil bids. The evil wants to prove I’m scared, it’s showing me what it will do when I submit. I watch myself slide my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. I walk toward the bedroom door open it, step out, and close it behind. I’m watching myself walk down the hall with a slow steady possessed pace. Not clumsy like a movie zombie, but with a creepy controlled determined march. I go out the building. Where am I going?? I go toward the dinning commons. Oh no. It’s like I know what I’m going to do before I do it and I have to watch this all play out in horror. I punch the glass on the locked door and turn the deadbolt on the inside. I head toward the kitchen and just inside the door I find the knife rack. I grab a handful by the handle and hold them together in my left hand. I know what’s happening. I know my orders.

I head back toward the dormitory. I walk back down the hallway. I get back into my room. I close the door behind me. I put the largest cutting knife, a proper large chef’s kitchen chopping knife, into my right hand. I walk over next to where my first roommate is sleeping on his back. I stand near his torso and with a solid downward blow deliver the knife straight into his chest. He doesn’t make a noise or move. He’s dead. I leave the knife handle sticking out of his chest. I grab the next biggest knife, turn and walk over to the other roommate and drive it into his chest. He’s dead now too. I’ve killed two people. Two people I don’t even know. I’m going to prison. I am a psychopath, I am actually going crazy. This is when my mind has snapped.

I fight this. I’m back in my bed, knowing I can prevent what I just saw from happening. But I’m terrified what will happen if I give up? What if I get tired? One false thought right now could send me into submission. What is there? Nothing around me can help. I’m paralyzed. I can’t trust anything. What have I learned, what has my mind taught me? This is temporary! This is in my head. I can fight it. I can stay awake. I won’t get tired. This will pass, as all things come to pass. Remain equanimous. The evil images flicker. I can do this. This is temporary. It will pass. More flickering. This is temporary. Remain equanimous and nothing can hurt me, no misery. A pulse of relent. It’s losing strength. This is temporary. This will come to pass as all things do. It’s getting weaker. I repeat this until everything evil retreats back into the shadowy corners of the room. They come, but these thoughts push them back. I can see the room. There are no bodies on the floor, just the carpet. The walls are plain, no torture chambers. Finally, the evil is gone and everything is quiet again. It’s not coming back. It’s done. Mentally exhausted, but finally feeling safe again, I roll over and instantly fall asleep. I estimate that the whole episode lasted about seven minutes in real time. It was the scariest experience of my life.

Continued in Part III