Vipassana Diary - Day 5

Day 5 - 28 Aug, 2009

Dear Diary,

Today was a good day. A quick day, too. Vipassana requires a lot more concentration but makes time fly by. It's also becoming a lot more natural; the beast has nearly been tamed.

It's amazing how quickly you can train your brain so that it can detect the subtlest sensations on your skin, things that you would have been totally unaware of before. All of a sudden I'm feeling everything everywhere.

I should explain something before I continue crapping on. There's a point to all this, these aren't just meaningless relaxation techniques, they're supposed to be connecting my conscious to my subconscious mind.

Here's my quick 10-second guide to enlightenment.

1. Become aware of your subconscious mind
2. Learn how to disconnect your conscious and subconscious mind
3. Done. Enlightenment
   

We're still at step 1.

It does make some logical sense. By having complete control of your mind and emotions, you essentially control how you want to feel. Want happiness? It's yours! Want love? It's yours!

It's not all roses and rainbows here though. The guy in front of me is a sweater. A horrendously bad sweater. Granted it is fairly humid, but by the time there's a slight hint of dampness in my armpits, his back is challenging Niagara for a water-flow record. It floods through his white shirt at a torrential rate, and by the end of each day it's turned a horrible grey-brown colour.

I'd have more sympathy for him if he'd stop farting. He sounds like he's dropping rabbit pellets when he does. He's not the only one either, all the Indian guys fart. Burp too. It's incredibly distracting, especially when it's less than 2 feet from your face.

Ok, bed now. I feel exhausted.

Pics of Things and Stuff

Golden Temple again.

Vipassana Diary - Day 4

Day 4 - 27 Aug, 2009

Dear Diary,

Today I blew my nose.

I didn't really. When I said Noble Silence is driving me crazy, I meant it. The strangest memories have started popping into my head. Some good, some bad, and some just little trivial snippets of long-forgotten moments.

"Today I blew my nose" is actually an old diary entry of AJ's. Way back in early primary school he was asked to keep a diary as a school project, and showing early signs of the creative powerhouse that he would grow up to become, those 5 words once constituted and entire day's entry. Just one example of the junk that's bubbling up from the depths of my stimulation-staved brain.

I found out in the post-lunch session that we haven't even started practising Vipassana yet! This breath-watching is just a precursor, a foundation, 4 days of ground work, 40 hours of getting ready, basically. Oh, it has a name too, Anapana.

Vipassna is really not all that different. It's basically just Anapana, but instead of just watching your breath, you watch everything. You shift your concentration from head to toe, one square inch at a time, analysing each part of the body carefully. All you do is look for sensations, the touch of your clothing, the breeze from the fans, pins and needles, tingles, heat, cold, anything. You keep your mind focused on a specific spot until you can feel something/anything there, and then you move on.

It might sound easy, but it's not. Trying to pinpoint the slightest of sensations on area like your lower back is near impossible.

All afternoon we practiced the new Vipassana technique and now I feel incredibly drained. I'd never have imagined meditating could be so unbelievably taxing.

Pics of Things and Stuff

Jodhpur's impenetrable fort.

Vipassana Diary - Day 3

Day 3 - 26 Aug, 2009

Dear Diary,

Ouch ouch ouch!!!

Sorry, it's only been 3 days and all I've done is whinge, but $#@%, I'm just not built for sitting unsupported. 3 days of meditation can't right the wrongs of 28 years of bad posture. Still, it was another marginal improvement of the previous day.

I'm starting to feel a lot better about the daily routine now, I've settled in nicely. The pain in my back is my only real complaint. And my ability to concentrate improves with every hour - we have to practise, practise, practise to tame the wild cecentration beast, Goenka keeps telling us. My beast is still far from tame. My beast foams at the mouth like a rabid dog and savages any thoughts that dwell in my mind for more than a few mins. But that foam is slowly turning to drool and the bites to nips. A few more days and I might even consider petting him... with a long stick.

Aside from the book-on-tape teachings we receive from the wise Goeaka, we also have our very own Enlightened One that presides over the class. If he does have a name, I never heard it and it's too late to ask now. I refer to him as the White Wizard in my head, and he does look a lot like a wizard. He must be 80, or very close to it, and he wears a white cotton outfit that's so loose you could easily mistake it for a gown. Atop his head sits a neatly wrapped, small white turban, and a a wispy beard flows like a white waterfall from his lower jaw. If you took this man out in a blizzard, you'd never see him again.

At least once each day, the assistant teacher will come around and tap my cushion, this means it's time to meet the Wizard. Silently I sneak up to the front of the mediation hall and sit down in front of him. He then proceeds to ask me if I understand the technique, and if I can feel the touch of my breath. I nod. You can speak to the Wizard if want to, but I don't. The Wizard and I meditate together for a few mins and then it's back to cushion #24 to finish off the session.



The main objective of the Vipassana technique is to ultimately free your mind from craving and aversion (the two key causes of misery according to Buddha), but right now if Buddha was standing between me and a cold beer, I'd probably set him on fire to get to it.

Tonight, for the first time a long time, I feel genuinely lonely. Most likely just a nasty side effect of Noble Silence, but it's not a very pleasant way to go to bed.

Pics of Things and Stuff

Continuing the 'by night' theme, misty Shimla as seen from my hotel balcony.

Vipassana Diary - Day 2

Day 2 - Aug 25, 2009

Dear Dairy,

Well, that was painful. Very painful. But it was slightly less painful than yesterday, so at least things are heading in the right direction.

This is going to be a long 10 days. A very very long 10 days.

During what little free time we had yesterday, I realised just how few moments of my normal day-to-day life are spent doing nothing. It's rare that I'm not occupied with something. When you have an hour to kill, and your only weapon is the spacey, abstract thoughts of your subconscious, then it become a lengthy hour indeed.

There is a coat rack above my bed. There are 4 hooks on this coat rack. I've calculated that if I hang the small drawstring cover from my sleep-sheet on the hooks, then I can use it to count like this:

1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4

and then back to the left:

7 <- 6 <- 5

and finally over to the right again:

8 -> 9 -> 10

...then it become a poor-man's abacus and my Vipassana calendar!

I forgot to take a photo, but it looked like this:


Noble Silence has already started to send me slightly batty. No man should ever be left alone with his own mind for this long. I'm genuinely scared about what might begin to poison my contemplations after an entire week without external stimulation.

To relieve some of the boredom, I did some exercise during our break after lunch. Nothing fancy, mostly stretching and strengthening exercises for my legs - something I've been doing most days to help compensate for my lack of running. It did help the time pass.

All today's lectures were identical to yesterday's: just breathe and watch it. Breathing I can handle, watching it is still hard, even after 20 hours of practice.

Yes, 20 hours already. We meditate for 10 hours of every single day! That's more time than most of you spend at work. More time than all of you spend at school. There are probably wheelchair-bound PlayStation addicts that spend less time on their arses than I do.

I'm going to bed now. I'm trying to stay positive, but 3rd August seems like a long way away right now. *sigh*