On the 28th of Febuary 2016 I flew out to Myanmar in South East Asia with a meditation visa that would allow me to stay at a monastery or meditation centre for a period of 3 months. I had chosen to travel to Pa Auk Tawya in Mon state as this is one of the few places I could find that teach jhana, states of meditative concentration. I have practised various forms of vippasana or insight meditation but to have a tool that would allow me to deliberately still the mind seemed invaluable.
I arrived from the station in the monastery at about 4am and me and the taxi driver had great difficulty finding exactly where to go. It’s a big place, taking about 40 minutes to walk from the top to the bottom. The monastery is split into 3 parts, upper, middle and lower. The lower monastery is at the entrance and has the main office, the kitchens and is where all the female, both nuns and lay women, practitioners live and meditate. They have their own meditation hall and library and only really come to the upper monastery to help distribute food to the monks. The middle monastery is a smaller collection of kutis (meditation huts) for monks and they are in the process of building a new sima (meditation hall) there. The majority of the male residents stay at the upper monastery so that was where I would be however the main office was closed as one would expect at 4am and me and my driver didn’t really know what to do.
Eventually we found a nun who took us to the refectory at the upper monastery, just in time for breakfast which is served at sunrise, around 5am. I paid the driver and sat and watched as a train of monks, maybe 200-300 people long, walked down the corridor with their bowls and passed by a row of volunteers acting as servers who would dole out some noodles and vegetables then disappeared back up towards the dining hall. After all the monks had gone a line of lay people, referred to as yogis, walked up and similarly were served. There were about 40 or so and maybe 15 were clearly foreigners. This was all conducted in silence.
The nun who had shown me here offered me a silver bowl and I too went to collect some breakfast then followed the fast disappearing line up a corridor and into a 3 story building where everyone was sitting down to eat in various places, along the corridors or in a room containing a bunch of Buddha statues.
I found the basement area was marked as for foreigners and made my way down there finding about 10 tables or so and took a seat to eat my much needed food. After washing up and returning the bowl it was now time to find the foreigners registration office.
I should mention that I was feeling exhausted. I had taken the overnight train from Yangon to Mawlamyine which took 10 hours. There was the hope this would be a rather gentle and sleepy affair but the state of the train was such that that was not possible. I was informed by a family doing the same journey that the railway was built by the British 125 years ago and had not been upgraded since, only maintained. It certainly felt like that. The ride was so bumpy the whole carriage was constantly being thrown up out of our seats, sometimes almost a foot. I found this absolutely hilarious…for the first hour or so then it started to hurt. I was in first class so had a reclining chair as opposed to a wooden bench but it was broken so that the back didn’t lock meaning every time I was launched out of the seat I would first land and then be smacked in the back as the seat flipped up . Although that was the main discomfort it wasn’t the only one. The windows had to be kept open to allow the breeze to cool us but this meant we collected a horde of mosquitoes, moths, dragonflies and other fun creatures attracted by the lights as we rode through the countryside that would fly around the carriage. Another fun feature was the light fixture that had water flowing from it for the entire trip. I have no idea where this water came from as it was the hot season and there was no rain and the bathroom didn’t have any running water but it didn’t cease for the 10 hours and so we had a nice pool of water sloshing around the carriage, a pool that became horribly muddy when a village women brought on some bails of poppies and stowed them in the gangway. Suffice to say this journey was incredibly tiring and I was really looking forward to finding my room and being able to shed my backpack.
This wasn’t so easy and I wondered up and down the monastery in the now 30 degree heat trying to find it. I believe it was now the morning meditation so there weren’t too many people about and it took a while before I found someone who knew where it was. I finally found the correct kuti and a monk took my passport and read me the rules of the place which was essentially to follow the daily routine and abide by the 8 precepts then told me that I would find my room in the sangha office.
| 3:30 am | Wake-up |
| 4:00 – 5:30 am | Morning Chanting & Group Sitting |
| 5:45 am (approx.) | Breakfast Piṇḍapāta (Exact time of Piṇḍapāta depends on the time of dawn) |
| 7:00 – 7:30 am | Cleaning & Personal Time |
| 7:30 – 9:00 am | Group Sitting |
| 9:00 – 10:00 am | Interviews, Walking Meditation & Personal Time |
| 10:10 am (approx.) | Lunch Piṇḍapāta |
| 1:00 – 2:30 pm | Group Sitting |
| 2:30 – 3:30 pm | Interviews & Walking Meditation |
| 3:30 – 5:00 pm | Group Sitting |
| 5:00 – 6:00 pm | Interviews, Work Period & Personal Time |
| 6:00 – 7:30 pm | Evening Chanting & Group Sitting |
| 7:30 – 8:45 pm | Dhamma Talk (in Burmese) |
The sangha office is a building whose top floor is the library and ground floor contains the office where the monks sort out donations and their requisites and a bunch of rooms for short stay people. It was essentially just a couple of wood plank beds but that’s all one really needs. I dumped my stuff but thought it best to attend the upcoming meditation session as it had been impressed upon me the need for strictly adhering to the schedule and I didn’t feel like rebelling on my first day. I only made it to the first session after lunch before I had to collapse in my room and sleep. I actually spent the next 2 days in bed, for whatever reason I was throwing up at night and I just felt the need to sleep constantly which I pretty much did, only breaking that to introduce myself to my roommate Kominn who had arrived the same day. He was a lovely fellow, an English teacher from Yangon only a few years older than me and we spent a bunch of time of the next 2 weeks discussing Buddhism and Myanmar. He also kindly brought me back some bits from lunch when I wasn’t feeling up to going those first 2 days.
I suppose I should try an outline what my intentions were for being in a jungle in South East Asia with a bunch of bald recluses. I recently read a line from Albert Camus that conveys for me a familiar feeling –
“A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive.”
I find myself on occasion, more frequently now, having the feeling of being outside of things as they occur. I have snapshots of memory from my childhood, staring at some homework feeling something greater than mere aversion, I kind of bewilderment at the juxtaposition of having once not existed and then suddenly and without warning having maths problems stare up at me from the table at 7pm on a Thursday evening. Isn’t that weird? It’s as if the curtain drops and the sense that I’m going around in circles becomes very prominent for a reason I know not. I find then that the deepest part of me is aching to address this and Buddhism, so far as I understand it, seems to offer a means of approach.
The legend is that the Buddha-to-be left his palace 2500 years ago in Northern India in search of an answer to the problem of ‘dukha’, often translated as suffering but to me conveys more a sense of discontent. After spending some time with some meditation teachers and not finding any lasting satisfaction he attempted a series of ascetic feats such as fasting and holding his breath for extended periods of time. This scene is actually depicted in a painting hung above the stairs coming down from the meditation hall at Pa Auk.
After becoming disillusioned with self – mortification he remembered a time from his youth:
“I thought: ‘I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful mental qualities — I entered & remained in the first jhana: rapture & pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?’ Then, following on that memory, came the realization: ‘That is the path to Awakening.’
Sitting under the famed Bodhi tree he developed this state until it lead him to the three knowledge’s, that of remembering his past lives, the workings of karma and the realization that it is craving that causes suffering. In doing so he became the Buddha, the awakened one.
Fast forward 2500 years and I’m kind of thinking that seems like a pretty cool thing to do. Only problem is it would seem that it has been largely forgotten how it is done. Buddhism, as with all religions, has split into a number of sects and they all disagree with each other on what the ‘right’ way to emulate that is.
Even within one particular tradition, the Theravada tradition that survives in South East Asia and Sri Lanka, you will find many different practices although they do by and large agree on some main points:
- Morality and living a good life is conducive to happiness and to meditation
- Enlightenment in its various phases comes from insight into the nature or workings of the mind.
- To gain insight you need to concentrate the mind.
At Pa Auk the abbot, who was a monk from the age of 10, spent his life studying the scriptures and their commentaries and sub sub sub commentaries and meditating in the woods to come up with an incredibly scholarly and orthodox approach. All around the monastery you will see this poster below which describes the step by step process one needs to follow to attain a glimpse at Nibbana, a state of mind where there is no suffering. Represented by a lovely little flag on some of the posters, the sort you may find at the end of a Super Mario level.
To briefly outline the process the first level is the fulfilling of the various training rules, that’s 227 for monks and 8 for nuns and lay people. Specifically for me that would be no killing, no lying, no sexual activity, no stealing, no eating after midday, no sleeping on nice beds, no adorning for the purposes of beautification (i.e. jewelry and make up) and no singing, dancing or going to shows.
Next one learns how to concentrate the mind, there are 40 different meditation subjects taught here but the most commonly used is the breath. Concentrating the mind on the breath can take you to 8 different, increasingly refined, levels of ‘jhana’ or absorptions. I’ll say a quick word about jhana to hopefully de-mystify it a bit. Everyone has experienced absorption in their life to different degrees. Ever been totally engrossed in a really good book, a real page turner? That’s a low level absorption. You can be in the noisiest train but completely unaware of your surroundings, the mind instead hanging on to every word with no effort from you. If you were to instead read a really erudite physics text book and, depending on your proclivities, it may be a real struggle to stop the mind wandering and you may find yourself re-reading sentences consistently because it’s so damn boring. Jhana is like the first situation. Except there is incredible bliss. And you can’t feel your body. And you have no thoughts. And there is a big fucking white light encompassing your whole conscious experience. Okay, so it’s a little more extreme however the mechanism behind it is the same.
Once you have learnt to hold your mind to a pinpoint you use that mind to discern the components of your experience, here, true to their scholarly tradition, that gets really technical and you start to encounter massive lists such as the 89 different types of consciousness and their 52 accompanying mental factors but we don’t really need to go into that.
Now that that is discerned it all has to be viewed as impermanent, unsatisfying and not as yourself or belonging to yourself. Doing so one passes through 16 different levels of realization, culminating in nirvana. The first time one attains Nirvana one becomes a stream-enterer, the first of four levels of enlightenment. Repeat journeys to Nirvana erodes negative character traits until finally one attains ‘fourth path’ and becomes an arahant who will never be reborn again and has once and for all uprooted the 3 defilements of greed, hatred and delusion. This is an oversimplification but broadly outlines the dogma of what enlightenment is in orthodox Buddhism.
Now after I had gotten physically better I felt in a little predicament in that on my last retreat I had made some good progress using the Mahasi Sayadaw method and I felt I had something to finish there. Mahasi Sayadaw was another Burmese monk who invented an approach to Buddhist meditation that involved mentally noting all the phenomena that pass through your consciousness. For example with walking attention is placed on the movement of the feet and as it occurs one notes mentally ‘lifting, moving, treading’ or when sitting the rising and falling of the abdomen is noted until it is interrupted by a thought or any other stimulus and then that is noted and the breath returned to. By doing this consistently throughout the whole day one builds concentration and starts to progress through the 16 ñānas.
So instead of going to see the teacher I dived straight back into this method and spent the first 2 weeks or so trying to note everything I did. I struggled though, a lot. I couldn’t seem to get any semblance of concentration going instead alternating between restlessness and sleepiness endlessly. This was very frustrating and the frustration brought up feelings of wanting to leave that plagued me for quite a while. I was trying my utmost to make the most of this opportunity but I couldn’t get anything to happen. Aware that maybe I was trying too hard and this was causing unnecessary agitation I would back off and try to be more gentle with my efforts but this would just end up with me nodding off.
In a sense this was good, the longest retreat I had done prior to this was 10 days and by the end of every retreat I never had wanted to leave feeling that there was much to explore and experiment with. I have experienced all this sleepiness and agitation before but also times of great pleasure and focus, never though had I felt I really got a handle on how to specifically bring anything about, more I felt like I stumbled into various states and before I got a good chance to explore them I would have to leave and return to normal life. At least now I had all the time to really try and figure this stuff out.
After 2 weeks Kominn had to leave and return to work in Yangon. This was quite sad for me as I had really enjoyed my time with him and learnt a lot about his country through our talks, it was also the only real communication I was doing as by and large silence is the norm and too much interaction is discouraged. As a parting gift he gave me one of his longyis, a type of sarong most people wear in Myanmar and would prove useful later when I split my trousers and his scarf that local yogis wear to signal they are abiding by the 8 precepts. I took the opportunity of him leaving to ask the registration monk if I could get my own kuti and promptly was allowed to move my stuff out of the room in the sangha office to a tiny wooden hut more towards the meditation hall.
Now in my meditation I concluded that I wasn’t making any progress and that it would be best, and I probably should have done this straight away, to go see the master and get instructions on jhana like how I was supposed to. When I did one morning he told me to focus on the spot just underneath the nose above the upper lip and to try and keep attention rooted there, not trying too hard or too little until I begin to see a light and once that light has stabilized and merged with the sensation of breath at the ‘anapana (breathing) spot’ to focus purely on the light. When I could do that for 4 hours without any hearing, seeing, feeling or thinking I could say I was in the 1st Jhana.
Well that doesn’t sound very easy but what else am I going to do? I hadn’t had any success up until now groping around in the dark so I set to it. The next 30 days or so were incredibly hard. Many times I felt like I just wanted to leave and would fantasize about going to Yangon and trying a different meditation center there, or going on some super adventure trying to search out a ‘weiza’ which is a kind of Buddhist wizard unique to Myanmar, I even thought about going to Korea and entering a Zen temple there. In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t go as I would have just had more of the same but in a different setting. At the same time I can see why the mind wanted it, other than reading in the breaks I had no entertainment, all I did every day was sit sweating in the now 38 degree heat until the mat I’m on was soaked trying desperately to stop the mind from wandering for 7 or 8 hours a day. I could see some patterns emerge as well. I would see myself day dreaming and think okay I’m not trying hard enough and really push for about 20 minutes to keep the mind from moving but would end up feeling tense and drained, the opposite from how concentration is meant to feel. As a consequence I would allow myself to return to day dreaming for some relief. Occasionally the mind would get bored of it’s fantasies and doze off. If I wasn’t tired it would instead slip into a kind of apathy where there wasn’t much thinking it was just a kind of dull awareness, one might be forgiven for thinking this is concentration but having had glimpses before of something different I knew this wasn’t it.
An objection one might raise would be well did you go back to your teacher about this? The answer is no because I knew from listening to other people’s interviews that there wasn’t any more to the instruction than what I had already been told. Just keep going back to the anapana spot, that is it. Starting to feel pleasant sensations? Go back to the anapana spot. Can’t stop falling asleep? Try harder to go back to the anapana spot. This is one of the great drawbacks of the scholarly tradition, in my opinion. Because everything has to be the orthodox position there is ‘the answer’ for everything, reading the abbot’s books of his talks I was struck how he answered questions for the most part by quoting from other parts of the canon and only rarely from an experiential standpoint. My feeling is that this approach is overall quite limiting and may go somewhere to explain why so many people have trouble with this system, even in the visudhimaggha, a 5th century commentarial overview of the Buddhist path that came to be the go-to manuscript for the Theravadan and in turn the Pa Auk Sayadaw’s interpretation, admits that only 1 in 1 million people who try breath meditation will have full success –
“[The] preliminary work is difficult for a beginner and only one in a hundred or a thousand can do it. The arousing of the nimitta [sign, specifically a light] is difficult for one who has done the preliminary work and only one in a hundred or a thousand can do it. To extend the nimitta when it has arisen and to reach absorption is difficult and only one in a hundred or a thousand can do it.”2
1 in 1 million will achieve the full progression? How did the Buddha ever gain disciples if no-one was able to actually accomplish what he taught? Something about this doesn’t ring right to me.
On one of my evening walks to the top of a hill I met a couple of nuns from Vietnam and got talking to them, I found out that they were both from the same monastery in Vietnam and had come to Pa Auk looking for a viable method of following the Buddhist path, one had been here only a few months and the other had been here 4 years. Inevitably we moved onto the topic of our meditation and the latter had been meditating every day since her arrival 4 years ago and only saw the light, the nimitta, after 3 years… 3 years! She had just completed the samatha (concentration) course and that had taken her another year. I was amazed, no way did I have the patience to wait 3 years to attain the first rung of the massive ladder. That’s not to say it would take that long but my impressions from talking to people is that actually doing what was being taught was incredibly difficult. Another monk I met had been here a year and still didn’t see the light.
Well I wanted to be 1 in 1 million, I was determined and because I wasn’t a Burmese monk but a sneaky Westerner I didn’t have any qualms about stealing bits and pieces from other traditions, trying them out and fiddling with everything until I could attain results. Rightly or wrongly I had been here a month and nothing much was happening.
I set about analyzing my experience of sitting and asking why could I not stay on the breath. I noticed that when I was day dreaming it felt nice. Pulling away from that to go to the breath didn’t feel as nice. That’s why my mind would spin these fantasies, anything to improve the situation of sweating in an uncomfortable sitting posture. I reasoned thusly – if I want to be able to direct my attention consistently I need to break the cycle of watching breathing, breath is boring, create imagining, pull back to breath, breath is boring e.t.c. and feel more content with how I am currently. How to do that?
I remembered how in the past my better meditations are characterized by comfortableness in the body. I also had an experience of dispersing a subtle tension in my legs by putting my attention there and breathing into them. I started playing with this, moving my attention around the body and trying to sort of feel my breathing penetrate my muscles. Isn’t this what they tell you do in yoga? Incidentally after taking a look at the 8 limbs of Patanjali’s yoga I see a lot of sense in the progression, you keep healthy mentally and physically by watching what you eat and how you behave, you make the body pleasant using asanas, do some weird stuff with the breath that I don’t yet understand, but want to learn more about, using pranayama and only then begin working with the mind in meditation.
A strange symptom I haven’t mentioned thus far was that for a while I had started feeling a curious sensation in my nose, like someone had their finger resting along the bridge of it and was lightly pushing it into my face. Also a little bit up from there my eyes were feeling really strained like I had spent my day being cross-eyed and both were sometimes quite uncomfortable. Interestingly another Western yogi who I spoke to had a similar thing with the nose, weird. Anyway now I was playing with this breathing thing I found that if I put my attention kind of where my brain is, in the middle of my head behind my eyes I could release this pressure and gain a bit of relief, it would quickly come back when I stopped but I found that an interesting experience none the less. Overall this approach to consciously relaxing my body, coupled with some physical stretches I started to do before every sit stood to calm the body and in turn the mind. When the body feels better, the mind is less bothered about trying to run away and search for nicer feelings and as a result everything is stiller.
Now my visa was a 3 month one and I hadn’t asked to renew it because things up until now had been pretty rubbish, I also thought that the 3 months started from when I got handed it which would have been 2 months prior to this point and so I should be running out of time with only a month left. One of the things I wanted to learn before leaving was the 4 elements meditation, a type of meditation unique to this particular monastery and so I went to the teacher to get the instructions.
It works like this, according to Buddhist theory all physical matter is constructed of combinations of 4 elements – fire, water, wind, earth. Initially that seems a bit archaic and weird but they break it down in a really interesting way. Physical objects are sensed through the body and can be known through 12 different types of sensations. Temperature, i.e. cold and hot belongs to the fire element, the sensations of cohesion and fluidity are water element, wind is pushing and supporting and earth is hardness, softness, roughness, smoothness, heaviness and lightness.
So every 2 days I would go to the teacher and he would give me 2 characteristics and I would have to scan my attention up and down the body, repeatedly through each different part searching out these different types of sensations. Hot and cold can be felt pervasively though feeling the breath move across your skin is a prime example of a cool sensation, cohesion is a tightness so if you are sensitive enough one can feel how the skin is slightly taught though anything sticky is the clearest example, fluidity can be felt when you move saliva around your mouth and in the flow of blood, pushing is easy to see, any movement is a pushing sensation, supporting is felt for example when holding your back up straight – you are supporting yourself, hardness can be felt in your bones, nails and teeth, softness in muscles and fat, roughness on the soles of the feet, smoothness across your lips, heaviness in your legs and lightness in the flickering of your eyelids. These are just some examples.
An interesting phenomenon is that as I continued to do this my body became much clearer and I would get spontaneous images start to appear before my eyes. As I moved my attention through my skull, feeling the hardness of the bone I would see a skull spontaneously appear in my visual field and similarly as I went down my arm the bone show itself. At one point I realized if I opened my eyes and focused on the person in front of me and where there bones would be a faint image of a skeleton would overlay the visual impression of their body. This was pretty cool and a natural thing to have happen according to my teacher, he called it the ‘wisdom eye’ and in fact the basis for skeletal meditation which is another concentration method taught.
Whilst I was learning this I didn’t literally spend all day scanning my body, usually I would spend the morning doing it and then the rest of the day returning to my investigations in anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing), continuing to relax my body using the breath. Another point of progress came when I figured that the way in which I would breathe had an effect on me. Normally, I have since found, I breathe from the chest in a gaspy, more rapid kind of manner. I noticed when I or others dozed off in the meditation hall that the pace of breathing would change. If you imagine someone snoring right now it’s kind of a long drawn out rhythm of breathing and I found that if I breathe from my abdomen it feels more satisfying somehow, like I can take 2 shorter chest breaths or 1 longer abdomen breath with fuller lungs and I’m getting a similar amount of oxygen but the way it is delivered is more even and smoother the 2nd way. I’m not sure of the mechanics physiologically but in my experience it made a difference to how the body felt. One thing to be aware of though is that in the beginning I was manipulating the breath too much and after a while I had the sensation that I could never actually get enough breath, that my lungs couldn’t fill up as much as they needed. This was a bit unpleasant but I figured that all I needed to do was instead of forever riding the breath just set it going and it would continue by itself to breathe from the abdomen and I wouldn’t need to constantly fiddle with it. This solved that problem.
One of the days I was returning from the meditation hall and I saw the registration monk sitting at one of the kutis and he calls me over to ask if I want to extend my visa for another 3 months. I said that I thought it was too late now as I had to leave in a month, and the process itself takes that long, so it couldn’t be done in time but he assured me that the visa starts from date of entry, not from when I had received it, like I had initially thought. I already had bought a plane ticket to Thailand so I said I’d think about it. I wasn’t sure what to do because in extending it the £80 or so for the ticket would be wasted and also the chance to not be trapped in a monastery was always appealing. When I spoke to my friend, the one who shared my nose troubles (incidentally we had actually meditated with each other before on a retreat in England but it being a silent one hadn’t interacted), he made the point that families pay £100 or more to go to Disneyland and that the sacrifice of £80 to attain the bliss of jhana seems like a fair equivalent. I liked this point and made the decision to extend my visa although doing so would see me without a passport for the length of time it took to do that, upwards of a month, meaning I would be truly trapped here.
I continued to learn the 4 elements meditation and practice my anapana. I remembered from my old studies that there existed and American monk who had learnt a type of anapana in Thailand where you use the breath to first relax the body before concentrating the mind more steadily and I was luckily able to find a copy of his book in the library. In it he described exactly what I was experiencing in terms of releasing tension using the breath but he went further to state that there was actually a subtle flow of energies, although they can be thought of as sensations. Under the section of common problems he mentioned pressures in the head and that to alleviate these trying to relax the throat could help. Well I immediately went to do this and found that when I relax the throat specifically using attention and the breath that the eye pressure would sort of release and flow down into my solar plexus. A real relief.
In my readings I had come across the idea of subtle energy flow in various traditions, in yoga they call in prana, in Taoist and Chinese medicine it is called Qi or Chi and in Tibetan Buddhism it is called rlung. Each have mapped out the course of this flow around the body and share many similarities. I remembered reading that the Tibetans put emphasis on an umbrella like shape of pathways that starts as the air enters the nostrils, goes up the bridge of the nose in between the eyebrows then over the top of the head to the crown where it plunges down through the brain and then the throat all the way to the feet. I’m not sure how accurate a portrayal of their system this is but I did find that if I focused I could move the nose pressure along this path and what’s more when it got to the spot between the eyebrows a light would appear. A light! The nimitta! The nimitta had been stuck in my nose?
This realization about the flow of breath sensation around the body was a real turning point, soon I was able to move it around in a circuit, I could breathe in through the nose and feel this tingly feeling go up to the crown, down to the abdomen then up again along the back and back to the crown. It was really pleasant and went well with the 4 elements body scanning I was continuing to do. It was strange, I could feel my body opening up for lack of a better expression. There were bits that felt darker and less clear but if I kept my attention there and just breathed with it soon it was as if that part of the body would start to dissolve and would go from just being a solid block of arm to a bunch of fast moving vibrant sensations.
I wrote above about this feeling going up and down the back but in truth that was one of the last parts of the body to open and really it still feels much darker than the rest. Initially I was trying to go up and down the spine, like how everyone says that’s where kundalini goes, but it wasn’t really working. It was only when I read in Thanissaro’s (the American monk) book that there are two channels either side of the spine that I was able to release a big tension at the back of the skull down them. A couple of times I would be sitting and found that if one side of the body felt clearer than the other it would produce a pretty unpleasant sensation of spinning around in circles within myself, like being really dizzy. Luckily to fix this I just had to put more attention on the opposing side until it evened out.
It’s interesting about the light too, I would sit down for the evening session and after the chanting the external lights would go off and I would joke to myself (God its so lonely sometimes) that it was time to turn the internal lights on, take a nice long abdomen breath follow the feeling up the nose to the forehead and see the light break out in the black behind my eyelids. If I was able to circulate the breath energy evenly that light would grow bigger so that it felt like I was bathing in it, and bathing in it had this warm fuzzy pleasurable quality that was really quite nice. There were a few occasions where I started experience too much pleasure and nearly burst out laughing in the meditation hall for no discernible reason.
Reading this back to myself I sometimes think I sound crazy, and there were many times when I would question my own experience, ‘did that really happen?’ but then I would test it and try to repeat the experience, which invariably I could do.
This process also had strange effects on my general level of energy so that some nights I only needed 3 hours sleep then was raring to go as soon as the morning bell went. My current instructions for the 4 elements meditation were to do 4 characteristics at once, hardness, cohesion, heat and supporting until my body resembled an ice block (the white light suffused it). I found I was able to do this and also knew that the next step was to try and break apart the ‘ice block’, I started to do this and felt my whole body start to dissolve into these tiny little sensations, like having pins and needles over every inch of your body but with a kind of orgasmic energetic quality to it. After this particular session finished I knew that I just had to walk and walk for all the aliveness I felt within me and just paced up and down the road for an hour and a half until lunch time. In fact there came times where the physical pleasure would start to be so intense it was bordering on uncomfortable. Overall if I had to try and give a description of this state it was like drinking 10 redbulls then being massaged everywhere simultaneously by a really beautiful women you were in love with, yes there was a strong emotional component to it as well. Not long after this experience my teacher left to go teach in Singapore so I was to be left to my own devices, which I was kind of okay with.
One of my first ‘insights’, if I can use that term, was watching myself go through this roller coaster of physical and emotional craziness and just realize how bound up we are with pleasant and unpleasant feelings. I was at this point walking down to the village shops everyday for some exercise and to buy a cake for the following day and I wonder if the girls working there, who I became quite friendly with over time, could tell what I was going through. Some days the noise of passing cars and busyness of the non-monastic people felt overwhelming and I just wanted to buy my cake and scurry back, other days I felt a boundless compassion and love for everyone and just wanted to smile and pass off as much joy as possible to anyone I encountered. And it was all completely arbitrary.
Getting pretty skilled at spreading the energetic pleasure around my body I began trying to balance the mind, I would take a point such as the anapana spot or the abdomen and try and leave my attention there, but in a broad type of way without excluding things. I became very aware of the difference between trying and remembering. One of the big things I was struggling with in the beginning was that I was ‘trying’ to hold my attention on the breath, like I was physically holding it there. I got better when I just tried to remember it, remembering is a purely mental event and can be separated, at least in my mind, from trying. This makes sense because mindfulness in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, is sati which means to remember. The meditation teacher Shinzen Young describes meditation as combining the relaxation of falling asleep with the alertness that comes with drinking a big cup of coffee. I couldn’t agree more.
Now that I had sufficient pleasure and comfort my mind became much easier to direct and I felt like I was slowly able to start to withdraw the willing aspect of my mind. At the beginning of the session I would relax the body and spin the pleasure about then when that was sufficient I could begin to just rest the attention at a spot, occasionally it would fall off but I would see that and just poke it back a little bit and the pleasure and contentness became the glue that would keep it from wandering. Why go looking for more when just here feels great? Another analogy that comes to mind is that meditation is like a reverse panic attack. When one has a panic attack, and I have only ever had one (on my first meditation retreat ironically), there is an initial feeling of anxiety for whatever reason, or no discernible reason at all, and that in turn causes more fear that this is going to get out of hand which creates stronger unpleasant feelings which increases the fear and round and around it goes. A reverse panic attack then you feel pleasure which draws you into it which feels great which increases the pleasure e.t.c.
So I want to take a moment to get a bit technical now. The anapanasati sutta in the canon describes the instructions for the mindfulness of breathing in a series of steps. The first tetrad goes like this:
[1] Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ [2] Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ [3] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’[2] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ [4] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’[3] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’
A point of contention here is that some people, including the author of the Visuddhimagga and the Pa Auk Sayadaw, say that when the Buddha says ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body’ that means the body of breath, as in one is aware from the beginning to the end of the breath . But aren’t we already doing that when discerning long or short in the first steps?. Also the next step in calming the bodily fabrication is supposed to mean calming the breath, apparently. So if it is true that the bodily fabrication is the breath why would he not say before to breathe out sensitive to the entire bodily fabrication as opposed to the whole body?
Another part of the suttas (discourses) has some similes that describe the jhanas, here is the description of the first:
“There is the case where a monk — quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful qualities — enters and remains in the first jhana: rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. He permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal.
“Just as if a skilled bathman or bathman’s apprentice would pour bath powder into a brass basin and knead it together, sprinkling it again and again with water, so that his ball of bath powder — saturated, moisture-laden, permeated within and without — would nevertheless not drip; even so, the monk permeates, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of withdrawal. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal.
It’s just that this idea of jhana being a whole body awareness really fits my experience of being able to move and create pleasure using the breath so yeah. Also there is this sutta:
“I say, bhikkhus, that concentration too has a proximate cause; it does not lack a proximate cause. And what is the proximate cause for concentration? It should be said: happiness.
“I say, bhikkhus, that happiness too has a proximate cause; it does not lack a proximate cause. And what is the proximate cause for happiness? It should be said: tranquility.
“I say, bhikkhus, that tranquility too has a proximate cause; it does not lack a proximate cause. And what is the proximate cause for tranquility? It should be said: rapture.
“I say, bhikkhus, that rapture too has a proximate cause; it does not lack a proximate cause. And what is the proximate cause for rapture? It should be said: gladness.
Concentration has happiness as its cause, but I felt that I was being instructed that concentration would create happiness, not the other way around.
Anyway now that I have finished ranting about pleasure it would be a good time to say that one day it just stopped for me. I would sit down and I couldn’t get any of the zest and energy that I had been feeling to appear. This was a pain because, although I could feel relatively relaxed, without that strong sense of clarity I couldn’t see my mind with the same vividness. Its as if the energy that is used up when we tense ourselves is released and kind of acts to increase the output of consciousness, like adding more power to a speaker system amplifies the volume. A really clear example of this to me was when I was walking along the road and I heard a car coming up behind me that sounded really close, as I quickly stepped out of the way I noticed the surge of energy that I experienced from identifying a potential danger had the effect of honing and clarifying my immediate experience, in an attempt to deal with it I suppose.
So I struggled for a few weeks trying breathing into the spine and all sorts of things to get the pleasure/energy back but I couldn’t. And I don’t know why. At this point it was a bit over 3 months in and I had about 2 weeks left before I was to leave so I felt a bit lost for motivation and the old thoughts of wanting to leave came up and started to plague me. Then after a few days of battling this I had the thought ‘why am I making myself suffer by trying to get away from this?’ and that whole pull on me just kind of dropped away.
Really randomly some day following this I was going to lunch and I felt my awareness just start to sync up with my reality, so I wasn’t trying to do anything particularly I was just effortlessly aware of what was happening with no real stake in it.
When I went to sit I continued this theme and found the old energy spikes had come back. I spread it around my body until I was equally aware of every inch then just rode with it. I consciously then tried to follow the rest of the ananpanasati sutta, intuiting something in the instructions:
“[1] Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ [2] Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ [3] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’[2] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ [4] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’[3] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’
“[5] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to rapture.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to rapture.’ [6] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to pleasure.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to pleasure.’ [7] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to mental fabrication.’[4] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to mental fabrication.’ [8] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming mental fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming mental fabrication.’
“[9] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the mind.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the mind.’ [10] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in satisfying the mind.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out satisfying the mind.’ [11] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in steadying the mind.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out steadying the mind.’[12] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in releasing the mind.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out releasing the mind.’[5]
“[13] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in focusing on inconstancy.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out focusing on inconstancy.’ [14] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in focusing on dispassion [literally, fading].’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out focusing on dispassion.’[15] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in focusing on cessation.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out focusing on cessation.’ [16] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in focusing on relinquishment.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out focusing on relinquishment.’
So as I breathed I just tried to extend my awareness to the whole of my experience, I was already aware of my body and my thoughts but I took the gist of the sutta to mean to know every possible fluctuation of the mind as it occurred in real time. I would be aware of thoughts as they came and went and the pleasure spinning around me and just kind of rest my attention (releasing the hold on the mind) on no one point but the overall-ness until it became steady. Then I would switch the way I perceived things to focus on the fleeting nature of all the individual phenomena comprising my experience that were arising and passing.
A strange thing happened. Behind my navel I felt a strong surge of power shoot up through my stomach and past my heart. When it reached my heart it was like having a shot of adrenaline and my heart started beating a million miles an hour like it was going to explode out of my chest. It was quite scary but I wanted to keep going so allowed the whatever it was to continue rising until it got to my brain area. My eyes started convulsing really rapidly and the brightest light was pulsating through me. I had the thought I’m either going to get enlightened, go mad or die if I keep doing this but I tried to stay with it because I really hate working 9 to 5. Unfortunately it proved too much for me and I had to pull out.
That same evening I repeated the steps and got to it again, lasting a little longer than before. Over the next few days I was able to stay with this experience a little longer each time. I found the energy would rise to just underneath my skull and I would get this weird feeling like someone was tickling the top of my brain with a feather. After a while it felt like a little pin prick opened in my crown and a little stream of this thing was flowering over the top of my head like a fountain and cascading back down. It was incredibly blissful.
One of the side effects was that I completely lost consciousness of my body; it was as if I could feel the air around as if it was my body instead and I felt like a gradually expanding orb of light sitting in the meditation hall. Everything was flickering and flashing at an incredibly high speed like standing staring at a strobe light in a club. Another strange thing was that I felt like not me exactly but my organism, my whole being, was trying to figure something out. Like if you are sitting with a really intense problem and you are just mulling it over and over and over but there was no discursive thought, just the sense that one is trying to get to the bottom of something. I was no longer meditating I was being meditated it felt, some process was occurring and I just went with it.
I could see everything so clearly too and I felt like I was passing backwards through my subconscious so that I was beginning to see how this huge causal nexus of the mind operates and the last bit that I was able to see was the initial movement of mind that launches inclinations and propensities. I became aware of the intention I was holding to be ‘completely aware of everything’ and just looking and looking and looking and finally something clicked and this view arose in me that said something like:
‘how can I be MORE aware of my experience, that wanting to be more aware is just equally another part of experience?’
and something really strange happened. I felt the last bit of my mind that feels it is looking out at things sort of step in to my experience and dissolve so that there was nothing left for me to call ‘I’. There was no ‘I’, only a stream of passing phenomena and there was no-where to go, nothing to get and nothing to do, just pure stuff all by itself being itself. Normally I have a sense that I am looking out onto the world, when my concentration improves I feel that I am looking out onto my own thoughts and feelings which are equally a part of the world. When this happened everything went flat for lack of a better word.
This is incredibly hard to convey and even now when I try and recollect the experience I do it in my mind through the normal dualistic way of ‘me’ having ‘experience’ so that I can’t really taste it for what it was. Over the next few days I managed to get to this place about 3 more times and it was just utter equipoise. Beyond bliss. Bliss is a feeling, this was like the stopping of needing to get, go or experience anything other than what is happening right now. It occurred to me that there is no escape from all this, and realizing that is the escape.
And then my retreat finished and I left. The end.
Bonus pictures below
