Aloha and namaste.
So on the way to enlightenment there's this plane crash, right, and a bald bloke playing backgammon on the beach. There's a polar bear that nobody really, properly explains. We have to type this code in every 24 hours. Then, after a load of faffing about we're suddenly, inscrutably in the 70s and everyone loses interest.
Finally, after exhibiting superhuman endurance and sticking with it until the finale, we're punched in the eyes repeatedly and left to wonder what just happened.
Oh no, wait, we were on the way to spend ten days at Dhamma Malaysia. In a strange twist of coincidence, this is probably roughly the same amount of my life that I'll never retrieve from the makers of Lost.
Dhamma Malaysia is a complex that's about thirty minutes outside of Kuantan, and about four hours from KL by bus. Contrary to my previous believe it is not a monastery or any other kind of sectarian church or temple. It's more like a ultra minimum security prison or some kind of mental hospital for people who don't really pose a danger to society. Like this but nicer. Mostly nicer.
I thought the silence was part of the method, that after ten days with no speech and maintaining awareness of the the present, my brain would start working differently, that my consciousness would be altered for a while. I would have some kind of revelatory experience. Couldn't have been wronger.
-- Incidentally, gmail spell check suggests that "revelatory" is not a proper word and presents "ejaculatory" instead. I didn't have an ejaculatory experience at Dhamma either (more on that later), but after a few days locked in my own head I did start to involuntarily substitute the word "meditation" with the word "masturbation". When you've been deprived of verbal interaction for a long time, this becomes the height of comedy. --
So, enough waffle, here's what it's all about. Dhamma (or Dharma), is the path to enlightenment. It was rediscovered by Ghuatama Bhudda about 2500 years ago. It is achieved by living a wholesome life and intense introspection. This introspection technique - Vipassana - has been preserved and passed on through the centuries and is not quite what you might imagine. By living well and practicing Vipassa you can cleanse your mind and achieve ever more subtle levels of self experience, eventually leading to first hand experience of reality at its most granular level and thus ultimate truth.
Actually, I lied about the waffle.
The theory goes that underneath the bustling town of your conscious mind is the deep, dark cave of your subconscious. Living within is a grubby little creature constantly yearning and loathing, a bit like Gollum from The Lord of The Rings. It is in touch with all your senses at all times. When you feel something nice, it craves more. When you feel something nasty, it generates aversion. This is a fundamental part of your cycle of consciousness and happens constantly. Every time you generate craving or aversion associated with positive or negative emotions, a kind of psychic damage is created. These are called sankara. I think of these as a mixture of emotional scars and behavioural conditioning.
These sankara can be generated by something small, such as "the guy immediately in front of me in meditation class has just farted into his plastic chair again", and thus weak. They can be large and very powerful, caused by moments of intense emotional upheaval: bereavement or grievous injury. This in turn is an engine for generating more craving or aversion. It is this that makes you unhappy.
This behaviour is also linked to your conscious mind dwelling mostly in the past or future, ruing some unhappy event or action, grasping after something you don't possess.
If you take out all the Sanskrit words it could almost be written by a Western psychologist. It makes perfect sense. So why doesn't everyone just stop this behaviour? It's because you have little direct control over your subconscious. I buy into all this completely.
By focusing intently on your own bodily sensations, the present reality as you are experiencing it, and accepting them without aversion or craving you stop generating sankara and train your subconscious to start taking a more balanced view of your situation. When you stop generating sankara, old ones rise to the surface and dissipate. This makes you happier.
At the same time, you are honing your mind to ever increasing levels of subtlety. Eventually you are able to experience reality at its most basic subatomic level, subjectively. This I struggle with. If I hadn't read previously about the conceptual ties between Eastern mystical thought and Western subatomic physics - the interconnectedness of all things, perceived reality as an illusory construct of the consciousness, the interchangeable nature or energy and matter - I might have scoffed at this part of the teaching. Fortunately, Vipassana is about accepting only what you observe first hand and not what you are told. I think this is may favourite part.
Allegedly, having experienced the ultimate truth it is impossible not to draw conclusions about the best way to live in accordance with the law of nature. This can be boiled down into five precepts:-
You cannot speak or be spoken to and thus distracted. You cannot leave once you enter and thus be distracted. To must wake up at 4:30am and meditate all day, and thus not be distracted. You have no contact with the opposite sex. You cannot, read, write, listen to music or play with electrical gadgets. You must eat only two meals a day, preferably containing tofu. You must leave your smack with the management.
Every day follows the same routine. A chime sounds periodically to let you know that that it's time to do something. Usually when the chime sounds it's time to meditate.
Between 4.30am and 10pm it's mostly meditation, sometimes in a big hall with other people, sometimes in private. The first three days are spent learning to quieten your mind. Your conscious puts up quite a fight - taking the time to observe the utter frantic nonsense it spews is enlightening in itself.
After day three, when you start on the proper Vipassana meditation, you are asked to sit and meditate without moving for an hour at a time. This hurts quite a lot. This pain is part of the meditation.
It's hard. I wanted to leave most days. Being inside your own head for so long is difficult. Not talking or even making eye contact with anyone is difficult. Meditating for upwards of eight hours a day is difficult.
The thing is - it works. I didn't witness subatomic particles. As a result of the meditation, all kinds of terrible things rose to the surface. I had terrible, powerful dreams and nightmares, full of fear and rage. The whole experience was cathartic. I felt lighter afterwards.
On day ten you can speak again and I learned that others experienced this while they where conscious. On day eleven, everybody felt great and had a smile on their face. This may or may not have been due to the end of imprisonment and tofu.
In order to get results out of Vipassana, you must practice it at least twice a day for an hour, attend a yearly course, and live by the precepts. It takes several years to liberate yourself from unhappiness and much, much longer to learn the true nature of reality.
I could get into the mediation. I could commit to ten days a year.
I struggle with the precepts.
In fact, eating meat, intoxication and sexual misconduct is pretty much my recipe for a great night in.
So one day, I'll switch to tofu and continue my journey up the highway of enlightenment but not right now.
For the next few years if you need to find me I'll be in the motorway services, sharing a bucket of KFC with Gollum.
So on the way to enlightenment there's this plane crash, right, and a bald bloke playing backgammon on the beach. There's a polar bear that nobody really, properly explains. We have to type this code in every 24 hours. Then, after a load of faffing about we're suddenly, inscrutably in the 70s and everyone loses interest.
Finally, after exhibiting superhuman endurance and sticking with it until the finale, we're punched in the eyes repeatedly and left to wonder what just happened.
Oh no, wait, we were on the way to spend ten days at Dhamma Malaysia. In a strange twist of coincidence, this is probably roughly the same amount of my life that I'll never retrieve from the makers of Lost.
Dhamma Malaysia is a complex that's about thirty minutes outside of Kuantan, and about four hours from KL by bus. Contrary to my previous believe it is not a monastery or any other kind of sectarian church or temple. It's more like a ultra minimum security prison or some kind of mental hospital for people who don't really pose a danger to society. Like this but nicer. Mostly nicer.
I thought that we'd be spending quiet time with some smiley monks, maybe doing a bit of gardening or cleaning, meditating, having a bit of a rest and learning how to bring my incessantly fidgeting, chattering, mind to heel. I was quite, quite wrong.
I thought the silence was part of the method, that after ten days with no speech and maintaining awareness of the the present, my brain would start working differently, that my consciousness would be altered for a while. I would have some kind of revelatory experience. Couldn't have been wronger.
-- Incidentally, gmail spell check suggests that "revelatory" is not a proper word and presents "ejaculatory" instead. I didn't have an ejaculatory experience at Dhamma either (more on that later), but after a few days locked in my own head I did start to involuntarily substitute the word "meditation" with the word "masturbation". When you've been deprived of verbal interaction for a long time, this becomes the height of comedy. --
The Theory
So, enough waffle, here's what it's all about. Dhamma (or Dharma), is the path to enlightenment. It was rediscovered by Ghuatama Bhudda about 2500 years ago. It is achieved by living a wholesome life and intense introspection. This introspection technique - Vipassana - has been preserved and passed on through the centuries and is not quite what you might imagine. By living well and practicing Vipassa you can cleanse your mind and achieve ever more subtle levels of self experience, eventually leading to first hand experience of reality at its most granular level and thus ultimate truth.
Actually, I lied about the waffle.
The theory goes that underneath the bustling town of your conscious mind is the deep, dark cave of your subconscious. Living within is a grubby little creature constantly yearning and loathing, a bit like Gollum from The Lord of The Rings. It is in touch with all your senses at all times. When you feel something nice, it craves more. When you feel something nasty, it generates aversion. This is a fundamental part of your cycle of consciousness and happens constantly. Every time you generate craving or aversion associated with positive or negative emotions, a kind of psychic damage is created. These are called sankara. I think of these as a mixture of emotional scars and behavioural conditioning.
These sankara can be generated by something small, such as "the guy immediately in front of me in meditation class has just farted into his plastic chair again", and thus weak. They can be large and very powerful, caused by moments of intense emotional upheaval: bereavement or grievous injury. This in turn is an engine for generating more craving or aversion. It is this that makes you unhappy.
This behaviour is also linked to your conscious mind dwelling mostly in the past or future, ruing some unhappy event or action, grasping after something you don't possess.
If you take out all the Sanskrit words it could almost be written by a Western psychologist. It makes perfect sense. So why doesn't everyone just stop this behaviour? It's because you have little direct control over your subconscious. I buy into all this completely.
By focusing intently on your own bodily sensations, the present reality as you are experiencing it, and accepting them without aversion or craving you stop generating sankara and train your subconscious to start taking a more balanced view of your situation. When you stop generating sankara, old ones rise to the surface and dissipate. This makes you happier.
At the same time, you are honing your mind to ever increasing levels of subtlety. Eventually you are able to experience reality at its most basic subatomic level, subjectively. This I struggle with. If I hadn't read previously about the conceptual ties between Eastern mystical thought and Western subatomic physics - the interconnectedness of all things, perceived reality as an illusory construct of the consciousness, the interchangeable nature or energy and matter - I might have scoffed at this part of the teaching. Fortunately, Vipassana is about accepting only what you observe first hand and not what you are told. I think this is may favourite part.
Allegedly, having experienced the ultimate truth it is impossible not to draw conclusions about the best way to live in accordance with the law of nature. This can be boiled down into five precepts:-
- Do not harm living beings (includes eating meat);
- Do not lie;
- Do not steal;
- Do not engage in sexual misconduct;
- Do not partake of intoxicants.
Dhamma Malaysia
The compound at Dhamma Malaysia allows you to live wholesomely and practice Vipassana in a quiet, secluded location.You cannot speak or be spoken to and thus distracted. You cannot leave once you enter and thus be distracted. To must wake up at 4:30am and meditate all day, and thus not be distracted. You have no contact with the opposite sex. You cannot, read, write, listen to music or play with electrical gadgets. You must eat only two meals a day, preferably containing tofu. You must leave your smack with the management.
Every day follows the same routine. A chime sounds periodically to let you know that that it's time to do something. Usually when the chime sounds it's time to meditate.
Between 4.30am and 10pm it's mostly meditation, sometimes in a big hall with other people, sometimes in private. The first three days are spent learning to quieten your mind. Your conscious puts up quite a fight - taking the time to observe the utter frantic nonsense it spews is enlightening in itself.
After day three, when you start on the proper Vipassana meditation, you are asked to sit and meditate without moving for an hour at a time. This hurts quite a lot. This pain is part of the meditation.
It's hard. I wanted to leave most days. Being inside your own head for so long is difficult. Not talking or even making eye contact with anyone is difficult. Meditating for upwards of eight hours a day is difficult.
The thing is - it works. I didn't witness subatomic particles. As a result of the meditation, all kinds of terrible things rose to the surface. I had terrible, powerful dreams and nightmares, full of fear and rage. The whole experience was cathartic. I felt lighter afterwards.
On day ten you can speak again and I learned that others experienced this while they where conscious. On day eleven, everybody felt great and had a smile on their face. This may or may not have been due to the end of imprisonment and tofu.
In order to get results out of Vipassana, you must practice it at least twice a day for an hour, attend a yearly course, and live by the precepts. It takes several years to liberate yourself from unhappiness and much, much longer to learn the true nature of reality.
The Verdict
I think it's right. It makes sense. It's non-sectarian. It's focused on results in your lifetime, not the promise of reward in some kind of afterlife. It's based on experience of the self and not some dogmatic belief or scripture. It's scientific, both in its nature of experimentation and observation and in the sense that it ties into the product of much scientific thought.
I could get into the mediation. I could commit to ten days a year.
I struggle with the precepts.
In fact, eating meat, intoxication and sexual misconduct is pretty much my recipe for a great night in.
So one day, I'll switch to tofu and continue my journey up the highway of enlightenment but not right now.
For the next few years if you need to find me I'll be in the motorway services, sharing a bucket of KFC with Gollum.
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