Seven Days of Silence

Dipabhavan

The seven day Dipabhavan Meditation Retreat on Koh Samui allows individuals to isolate themselves in silence to explore the inner workings of one's own mind. Students stay in dorms on the forested retreat grounds and maintain a rigorous schedule. In the mornings, students rise before dawn at 4:30AM, listen to meditation readings, practice yoga, sit in meditation, and then eat breakfast. After breakfast, students reconvene for Dhamma talks and walking, sitting, and standing meditation. At 11:30AM, students eat the final meal of the day. After lunch, students receive meditation instruction, practice sitting and walking meditation, chanting, and loving kindness meditation. Students break for tea and then practice more sitting and walking meditation by candlelight until 9:00PM. Lights go out in the dorms at 9:30PM. During breaks, students may bathe, wash clothes, do chores, and rest, but no reading, writing, or talking is permitted. Only vegetarian food is served.

If we were allowed to write during the retreat, we might have written the journal entries that follow.

Night 1. Awake on a Pillow of Thoughts

The first night, I laid in a giant dorm room in a human-sized three-sided plywood box with no mattress or sleeping mat. I felt the weight of my body press my bones into the wood. I forwent the monk-style wooden pillow in favor of a standard one, and my head, at least, luxuriated softly. But sleep did not come.

Instead, I laid on my back for seven hours listening to the sounds of the night, including my voice circling and chattering loudly in my head. My mind was louder than the fire-alarm bugs in the jungle. I journeyed back and forth in time, remembering, anticipating, and planning. Many of my thoughts were mundane and repetitive. Others brought feelings, ranging from pleasure to boredom to yearning. Sometimes I drifted into dream thoughts. Other times I analyzed the noises in the night - the jungle sounds, the rooster crowing, the cat crying, someone wailing, someone snoring. That night permitted no peace.

As I listened to my voice and observed my thoughts, I marveled at how they never stopped. Where did this chatter come from? Whose thoughts were these? Did I make these thoughts? Am I these thoughts? Who's listening to these thoughts? Why don't they stop? I feared for a moment that I was self-inducing madness. But could one really become mad simply by listening to one's own thoughts? From time to time, I tried to make the thoughts stop. But they wouldn't stop. Not even for two breaths. The week promised to be grueling.

Day 1. Trying to Meditate

In the morning, I sat on the cushion and tried to meditate. In mediation, one attempts to silence the mind by focusing on the breath. The cushion, posture, and focus should help the thoughts stop, I thought. But they didn't. As it turned out, 1 1/2 days passed before the thoughts stopped for more than two breaths at a time.

Day 2. Devilish Thought Tapes

I watched my repetitive thoughts from a distance. Many were joyful, most were neutral, and some were devilish little tormentors.

I witnessed the scourge of self-consciousness as I skipped chores for an extra cup of tea. My hyper-critical thought-tapes looped loudly when our apparently autistic instructor taught yoga in monotone. And impatience! Out of 10 hours of meditation, 9.5 were filled with impatience.

Gradually, I was coming to understand these nasty little mental habits. Slowly, I was learning to let them go.

Day 3. The Super-Mundane

As my mind began to calm, it felt like watching a really really long, slow movie. The longest and slowest movie in the world. An excerpt:

"in breath, out breath, in breath, out breath, tired knees, sore quads, focus on the breath, fill the lungs with air, exhale, fill the lungs with air, exhale, the floor boards are brown, there are two dark ones and two light ones, focus on the breath, in breath, out. . . "

I was reaching a state that the golden-robed, emaciated, super-heroes of meditation call the super-mundane.

". . . in breath, out breath, in breath, out breath. . . "

The mundane isn't just a consequence of meditation, but a goal. It is only through the super-mundane that we can train our minds. When we can focus on the most ordinary of all things, our own breath, then we can focus on anything. Many people say that their "meditation" is running, rock climbing, programming spreadsheets, showering, litigating, or another engaging activity. While these focus the mind, they do not train the mind. In meditation, we practice clearing the mind in the most challenging of circumstances: when we sit and do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

" . . . in breath, out breath, good God what drudgery!. . . "

Finally, I dove so deep into the ordinary, that the extra-ordinary resulted.

Day 4. Realizing the Minority

The humans around me had become zombies, eerily disconnected from one another. But incredible hoards of insects crowded me, so I never felt alone. As I became more and more aware of the insects, I, and not the insects, began to seem puny and insignificant.

Walking from the dorm to meditation, I realized that the metal handrails alongside the steep, winding stairs leading up to the meditation pavilion served the insects and not me. These elevated superhighways enabled ants, geckos, and spiders to zip uphill, bypassing mountains of tangled foliage. The tiny criss-crossers also owned the stairs and pathways, but, unlike the handrails, they shared these, mercifully, with me.

My heightened awareness of insects led me, for the first time in my life, to make eye contact with a bug. When an erratic little flapper dove towards my face while I was meditating, I sat motionless and looked directly into bug eyes. We locked eyes for an instant before she darted abruptly away. Making eye contact with that bug, who I recognized to be a member of the dominant group, made me feel strangely validated.

At night in my bed, I hid under my bug net and listened to the sounds of insects buzzing around light bulbs, slamming and clacking themselves against deceptive surfaces, and screaming in the jungle. Beetles overturned onto their hard shell backs spun in circles trying to flip themselves over. Listening to the insect cacophony, I drifted off to sleep.

Day 5. A Rhythmical Sermon of Nonsense

The sanga sat in silent meditation, waiting for our abbot to give the daily sermon. The 78 year-old monk shuffled in barefoot and bow-legged in his golden robe and big glasses. Slowly, mindfully, he assumed the lotus position at the head of the hall, rang a wonderful bell three times, and adjusted the microphone.

We sat cross-legged in rapt concentration, but the sermon was still a rhythmically-delivered string of non-sense with a bunch of Buddhist catch-phrases thrown in:
"Non-sense non-sense non-sense impermanence non-sense non-sense suffering cessation of suffering non-sense non-sense non-sense in and out in and out non-sense non-sense selfishness non-sense non-sense non-sense impermanence non-sense non-sense non-sense suffering cessation of suffering non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense non-sense in and out in and out"

His English was mostly unintelligible. But after this long undecipherable monologue of unknown content, peaceful meditation followed.

Day 6. Doing it Right

When the thoughts actually stopped, I felt shocked. I dabbled briefly in marveling over the shock of silence, which limited the initial silence to a few breaths at a time. Quickly, though, the silence expanded. I sat now for minutes at a time, feeling an internal quiet. My mind frequently interrupted this stillness with questions such as, "What is this stillness?" and "Is this the peace that proceeds death?" The thoughts never stayed away for long, but as the days passed, the frequency and duration of the silence increased. During some silent moments, I seemed to have lost myself. I became this fabled "oneness": I was the screaming jungle; I was the crystalline birdsong. For fleeting moments, there really seemed to be no "I," no "my."

The Buddhists say that meditation works irrespective of race or religious beliefs. Once achieved, meditative silence brings to some feelings of transcendence. While achieving silence feels gratifying, the silence itself is not the "goal." Thoughts invariably return. As one observes one's thought patterns and the feelings that come with them, one comes to know oneself better. The process of observing thoughts and returning to the breath is mediation.

Day 7. Loving Kindness

We broke from focused, sustained, mind-clearing to perform the Loving Kindness Meditation. In this meditation, we widen the circle of compassion by showering ourselves, our family and friends, strangers, and enemies with good will. I started generating loving kindness by picturing a little happy baby smiling. Then I pictured the sun rising in the morning, beaming brilliant radiance on verdant hills. Then I became that sun.

I shined my loving heat energy at people in my life. First, I shined at a picture of myself, because if you can't love yourself, then you can't love others. Next, I shined loving energy at my lover. Just before reaching ecstasy, I began to shine on family and friends. The official loving kindness script is, "May you be happy and well, may you find inner peace, may you avoid suffering. . . " and other dry Buddhist ideas. I preferred to improvise. I focused on peace and wisdom, but I also hoped that people would tell funny jokes, eat good food, make lovely art, make lots of money, or whatever seemed right for the individual. By this time, I was smiling from ear to ear and beaming with energy.

Next, I widened the circle of compassion, shining loving energy at acquaintances, new friends, co-workers, fellow meditators, and grocery store clerks. Finally, the hard part, I attempted to shine loving kindness to annoying pissants and mosquitoes.

The bell rang. With a wide smile, I meditatively strolled to tea.

Day 8: The Glorious Release of Friendliness

After seven silent days of pretending that our fellow mediators did not exist, we were free to look at each other and even to speak. In no time flat, fast, loud, exuberant talking overwhelmed the familiar sounds of the crowing rooster, crying kitten, and screaming jungle critters. Curiosity now unleashed, we probed and extracted each other's stories and scrambled to catch up on days of lost speaking before we dispersed.

We returned to Lamai beach, near the spa, with our new meditation friend, Nicky, and reunited with Armand. Over the next four days, we feasted on plate after plate of superb and healthy spa food while laughing endlessly. Through our tamed minds and fresh eyes, the world seemed new and captivatingly nuanced. People appeared exceedingly witty and beautiful, and nature's smallest hiccup gave us reason to pause.

Our minds felt crisp and relaxed. Normal annoyances dissipated, normal pleasures amplified. Trusting our intuition, we decided to follow our visions of wool sweaters and prayer flags. We found cheap tickets to Kathmandu from a Sikh travel agent tucked in an alleyway in Bangkok. We leave this afternoon. Himalaya here we come.

Love,

Brunksocki