ritual and rigid social stratification? Besides, Pam loved Goenka`s gorgeous voice. Every
night she was entranced by his deep sonorous chanting in ancient Pali of sacred Buddhist
tracts. She had been moved in similar fashion by early Christian devotional music,
especially Byzantine liturgical chants, by the cantors singing in synagogues, and once, in
rural Turkey, was transfixed by the hypnotic melodies of the muezzin calling the
populace to prayer five times a day.
Though Pam was a dedicated student, it was difficult for her simply to observe her
breathing for fifteen straight minutes without drifting off into one of her reveries about
John. But gradually changes occurred. The earlier disparate scenarios had coalesced into
a single scene: from some news source—either TV, radio, or newspaper—she learned
that John`s family had been killed in an airplane crash. Again and again she imagined the
scene. She was sick of it. But it kept on playing.
As her boredom and restlessness increased, she developed an intense interest in
small household projects. When she first registered at the office (and learned to her
surprise that there was no fee for the ten–day retreat), she noted small bags of detergent in
the ashram shop. On the third day she purchased a bag and thereafter spent considerable
time washing and rewashing her clothing, hanging them on the clothesline behind the
dormitory (the first clothesline she had seen since childhood), and, at hourly intervals,
checking on the drying process. Which bras and which panties were the best dryers? How
many hours of night drying were equal to an hour`s day drying. Or shade drying versus
sun drying? Or hand–wrung clothes versus non–wrung clothes?
On the fourth day came the great event: Goenka began the teaching of Vipassana.
The technique is simple and straightforward. Students are instructed to meditate on their
scalp until a sensation occurrs—an itch, a tingle, a burning, perhaps the feeling of a tiny
breeze upon the skin of the scalp. Once the sensation is identified, the student is simply to
observe, nothing more. Focus on the itch. What is it like? Where does it go? How long
does it last? When it disappears (as it always does), the meditator is to move to the next
segment of the body, the face, and survey for stimuli like a nostril tickle or an eyelid itch.
After these stimuli grow, ebb, and disappear, the student proceeds to the neck, the
shoulders, until every part of the body is observed right down to the soles of the feet and
then in reverse direction back up the body to the scalp.
Goenka`s evening discourses provided the rationale for the technique. The key
concept isanitya—impermanence. If one fully appreciates the impermanence of each
physical stimulus, it is but a short step to extrapolate the principle ofanitya to all of life`s
events and unpleasantries; everything will pass, and one will experience equanimity if
one can maintain the observer`s stance and simply watch the passing show.
After a couple of days of Vipassana, Pam found the process less onerous as she
gained skill and speed at focusing on her bodily sensations. On the seventh day, to her
amazement, the whole process slipped into automatic gear and she began «sweeping,”
just as Goenka had predicted. It was as if someone poured a jug of honey on her head
which slowly and deliciously spread down to the bottom of her feet. She could feel a
stirring, almost sexual hum, like the buzz of bumblebees enveloping her, as the honey
flowed down. The hours zipped by. Soon she discarded her chair and melded with the
three hundred other acolytes sitting in the lotus position at the feet of Goenka.
The next two days of sweeping were the same, and each passed quickly. On the
ninth night she lay awake—she slept as badly as before but was less concerned about it
now after learning from one of the other assistants (having given up on Manil), a
Burmese woman, that insomnia in the Vipassana workshop is extremely common;
apparently, the prolonged meditative states make sleep less necessary. The assistant also
cleared up the mystery of the police whistles. In southern India, night watchmen routinely
blow whistles as they circle the perimeter of the territory they guard. It is a preventative
measure warning off thieves in the same way the little red light on auto dashboards warns
car thieves of the presence of an activated auto alarm.
Often the presence of repetitive thoughts is most apparent when they vanish, and it
was with a start that Pam realized that she had not thought about John for two entire days.
John had vanished. The entire endless loop of fantasy had been replaced by the honeyed
buzz of sweeping. How odd to realize that she now carried around her own pleasure
maker which could be trained to secrete feel–good endorphins. Now she understood why
people got hooked, why they would go on a lengthy retreat, sometimes months,
sometimes years.
Yet now that she had finally cleansed her mind, why was she not elated? On the
contrary, a shadow fell upon her success. Something about her enjoyment of «sweeping»
darkened her thoughts. While pondering that conundrum, she dropped off into a light
twilight sleep and was aroused a short time later by a strange dream image: a star with
little legs, top hat and cane, tap–dancing across the stage of her mind. A dancing star! She
knew exactly what that dream image meant. Of all the literary aphorisms that she and
John shared and loved, one of her favorites was Nietzsche`s phrase fromZarathustra :
«One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.»
Of course. Now she understood the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana.
Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity,
tranquility, or, as he often put it,equipoise. But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken
up Vipassana, wouldLear orHamlet have been born? Would any of the masterpieces in
Western culture have been written? One of Chapman`s couplets drifted into mind:
No pen can anything eternal write that is not steeped in the humour of the night
Steeped in the humour of the night—thatwas the task of the great writer—to
immerse oneself in the humour of the night, to harness the power of darkness for artistic
creation. How else could the sublime dark authors—Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Virginia
Woolf, Hardy, Camus, Plath, Poe—have illuminated the tragedy lurking in the human
condition? Not by removing oneself from life, not by sitting back and observing the
passing show.
Even though Goenka proclaimed his teaching was nondenominational, his
Buddhism shone through. In his nightly discourse cum sales pitch, Goenka could not
restrain himself from stressing that Vipassana was the Buddha`s own method of
meditation, which he, Goenka, was now reintroducing to the world. She had no objection
to that. Though she knew little of Buddhism, she had read an elementary text on the plane
to India and had been impressed by the power and truth of the Buddha`s four noble
truths:
1. Life is suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by attachments (to objects, ideas,
individuals, to survival itself).
3. There is an antidote to suffering: the cessation of desire, of
attachment, of the self.
4. There is a specific pathway to a suffering–free existence: the
eight–step path to enlightenment.
Now, she reconsidered. As she looked about her, at the entranced acolytes,
the tranquilized assistants, the ascetics in their hillside caves content with a life
