I got 99 problems... and most of them are derived from seemingly unanswerable questions about the nature of consciousness.

Consciousness is a funny thing.

It’s a complex subject, and one that captivates me.

In fact, consciousness is what allows me to be captivated. It’s what enables me to write this, and you to read this (presuming anyone is reading this).

Consciousness allows for subjectivity, and subjectivity demands consciousness.

Consciousness is history.

It’s the passage of time. It’s your favorite band. It’s nostalgia. It’s depression.

 It’s hope. It’s story.

It’s Ouroboros.

 My interest in this arose out of alarm. My consciousness, my subjective experience, ignited young and crept along at a slow burn. I was confused by the flame, and ran from it.

That’s like running into a different room to escape a burning house.

After the inevitable failure of flight, I tried to drown it. I poured gin and whiskey into my wetware and it soaked through my life until my bones absorbed it.  

That’s like trying to put out a fire with kerosene. 

Finally, after exhausting myself, those around me, and all other options besides lying down to die, I decided to simply let the flames burn.

And here I smolder.

Soon to follow will be the first entry in a 3 part series I’m writing on consciousness.

Part 1: My story         or:  A Ride with T-Bird and the Boys.

Part 2: My study        or: It’s More Than I Thought!

Part 3: My sojourn    or: Holding Hands with Marla.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. It will be deeply personal, but also as academic as I’ve ever dared in my writing. The first part will be about my initial conflicts, mental health, addiction, and destruction.

The second part will be comprised of my (limited) studies into what exactly may be going on behind the scenes, and what that may imply for me as an individual, and an attempt to pull that veil of clouds back from across the great confused green sea.

And the third part will be my adaptive strategies, my current modality in terms of living as one of and amongst the confused, and any significant insights I’ve gleamed from my time in the trenches.

I hope it comes together in a cohesive and digestible manner. I hope it’s beneficial to others, and cathartic for myself.

I hope.

It’s been awhile since I have written.

Forgive me my hyperbole.

More soon.

-Jay

"Maybe I am a mess. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m out of my mind! But, god help me, I will keep these lights up until the day I die..."

Humans beings. People. All of us here today. We want things to make sense, so try to make sense of things. The difficulty in doing that, lies within the complex nature of reality. We make sense of this vast world by setting up systems and parameters, organizing with labels and classifications.

We have rituals, ceremonies, rites of passage, and traditions.

We facilitate these actions with language. Language meant to express meaning, significance, and milestones in our lives.

That’s an important word. Language.

It’s through language we share a common understanding of what life is. It plays a part in connecting us, but of course, doesn’t fully represent what we actually feel or experience.

And like the tradition of today’s ceremony, language was designed by people.

All for the purpose, of making things make sense.

You see, we all have this involved, complex, and all too often unexplored world of emotional charge and intellectual content and through the machinery of our language we boil it down to words.

Language was born out of necessity. Communication made the world we live in possible.

First, we developed words to discuss the outside world that we could easily navigate with our senses.

And once we all agreed and understood what everything outside us was, we were able to evolve language further.

We created names for people and places.

And words to help us evaluate these things.

And after we had catalogued the external world to a satisfactory degree, people were able to use the mechanics of language to chart the infinitely more complex scape of our internal worlds. Examining and analyzing with our newly formed capabilities, we started to map out human emotion.

But that’s an endeavor where we still fall short, because it is in-and-of-itself, an impossible task.

Because solely using words to describe an emotional state, say happiness, is like trying to describe the sky a beautiful sunset.

You can detail specifics, you can convey a personal feeling, you can layer on adjective after adjective, but it will never suffice as an actual representation of the beauty you witnessed. It’s impossible to communicate the true essence of the wonder we experience.

The beauty of the outside world is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder,

But inside?  Emotion in in the soul of the individual.

And what is it that impacts these emotions? What gives them rise?

Well, more things than I have time to go into right now. But I’d say it’s primarily a mixture of our personal histories. The combined experience of the places we go and the people we meet. And the events that arise in our lives, that are largely out of our control.

In fact, if you think about it, a lot of what happens in lives seems to be out of our control.

And one thing you definitely cannot control happens to be the same emotion that transcends these limitations of language.

The thing you can’t plan for is the same part of our inner world that IS easily understood through communication.

There is one feeling that demands itself to be known and seems to be required that you share it.

The sensation that eclipses all other emotions. The limitless inspiration of myriad books, movies, songs, poems, paintings, and dance throughout the collective of human history.

The very reason we are here today.

That thing, that one powerful thing is…

Love.

It doesn’t need a complex name, or a lengthy explanation. We don’t have to delve down into the depths of our unconscious state to examine its source.

Its mystery is as profound as our inability to deny it.

Yes, love is the exception.

With love, I don’t have to imagine what your sunset looks like, because it radiates enough for everyone to admire it.

I hope everyone here has felt that radiance before. And if you haven’t, well, you can feel it here today. I know I can.

And I felt it from the very first time I was in the same room as Jenny and Josh.

The way they talk to each other, they way the look at each other, their subtle body language, their care, concern, and compassion for each other, it all emanates the essence of the thing we call love.  

Love’s transcendence. Its inherent demand for acknowledgment. Its metaphysical origin pushing its way into our world by actually augmenting our very biological makeup, well it is a powerful thing.

Love is a feeling so powerful, that the human race, in all our diverse manifestations, has designed rituals and ceremonies solely to honor and celebrate the mystery of it.

And that is why we’re here today.  

I could continue to wax philosophical on love, but I’ll spare you. I will just give this advice, as it’s something I’ve found true in my own life:

Learn to recognize challenge as opportunity for growth.

Remember, going forward into your new lives together, that your love won’t always feel exactly like it does today. Because of the very nature of time and experience, you will change, and that love, your love,  will change along with you.

And it should.

Don’t hold onto a static representation of what you think it should look or feel like.

As life presents its trials, your love will be challenged.

That’s a good thing.

Because if we aren’t challenged, we stagnate.

But when we take on challenges, we grow better and stronger. And if you rise to meet those challenges together, your love will grow exponentially,

and your lives will be all the more enriched by the power of the love you have built with one another.

In closing, I want to say thank you. Like I said, humans want to make sense of things, or at least want things to make sense. And the two of you getting married, well few things in life make more sense than that

So, thank you.

Thank you for honoring your discovery of that feeling we call love, for being brave enough to commit to that love, and for inviting us all here to this ceremony to celebrate that love with you.

"I didn't know the forest spirit made the flowers grow..."

It’s been awhile. Lets kick things off with a convoluted quote from our boy Plato (Athens, 424ish-347 BCE) 

"What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less real existence and is less real.” (1) 

Yes. Awesome. Wait. What?

For me, this quote can be directly correlated to why I have converted to the way of Buddhism. Not the religious, deity worshipping ideology, but the philosophical, life living approach. (although I do prostrate, it’s more of a personal reminder to stay humble and a way to show respect to life). 

According to many philosophers, life has varying degrees of REALNESS. This realness can also be named FREEDOM. 

Not freedom in the sense of doing what you want, when you want, while saying what you want, to whom you want to (DON’T TREAD ON ME), but freedom from self. Or perhaps you could say freedom from the concept of self. A freedom that is accessible to everyone. A freedom that implies a higher level of reality. 

What is this reality you talk about?

Knowledge of one’s true motivations and implications that an identification with a self brings. 

While the man said “Know thyself”, maybe he meant “Know thy concept of self.” 

In knowing your “self”, I don’t mean your favorite color, what kind of smells you find detestable, or even your secret fantasies (you pervert). We have to get all comic book nerd on this shit and see what exists within the source material. Where do these things come from? Why do you feel that way? 

Particularly, why do you have the judgements, thoughts, and reactions you have, and, equally important, why do you make the decisions you make? Are you aware of the process? I don’t just mean sitting down and gathering knowledge for an informed decision, I mean what was the catalyst behind you wanting to make that decision in the first place? 

Do you understand why it is you do what you do? 

You do?

CONGRATULATIONS! That is freedom.  At least according to Hegel (Germany,1770-1831 CE) it is. 

According to Hagel, there are levels of reality consistent with the level of self-awareness a person has. So a person’s subjective reality is contingent on their ability to harness a macro perspective on their own thought processes. That is to say there is a higher plane of reality that exists on a spectrum that people are able to experience if they can tap into it. The deeper we tap into this, the wider our horizon of understanding self (catalyst for actions, defensive reactions, dependence of vice, reasons for decisions) becomes. And as we become cognizant of this vast spectrum of self, or what we had previously identified (or unconsciously identified) as self, the more we are able to access...

Well…

Freedom.

I thought we were talking about reality? 

Same thing.  Or so they say.

Who says? 

According to Stephen West, Hegel was saying “Something that makes itself what it is, is more fully real than something made by something else, and constantly dependent on something else.” (2) 

Sounds a little like Plato’s quote, right? 

The contrast being that Hegel was more focused on an external variable by which your internal is informed. But I think that that could just as easily be something manufactured from within. That is to say, unexamined thoughts or unrecognized patterns of mental processes that you let inform or control your decision making is just as inhibitory as the external stimuli that you let impact how you think, act, or behave. 

In dealing with both the external and internal, you need true recognition in order to be free.

Ok. Now, you’ve basically said freedom from self comes from awareness of self, but also implied that the concept of self or identification with a separate self is in and of itself wrong. Self. SELF! 

Well, here’s where it gets tricky. Or maybe not. Here is where this concept of freedom lies. Also, this is where I can find my personal connection to Buddhism and what I’m basing my current life approach around. 

I bring to the stage, my last contestant. Mr. Eckart Tolle (Earth, 1946-present). 

Mr. Tolle presupposes that that which we had previously established as freedom and/or reality is further conflated with BEING. 

Underneath our thought processes, under the internalized and learned mechanisms that make up the contents of what you address as YOU is pure consciousness. It not only exists in all of us, but it is the eternal that connects us all. It is being and it is right NOW. 

When is now? Well, regardless of what your clock says, it’s now. 

What does that mean?

Mr. Tolle says, 

"Nothing will ever happen in the past; it is happening now.

Nothing will ever happen in the future; it is happening now.” (3) 

Now is the constant. Underneath all the mental commentary, projections, anxieties and dread, expectations and hopes, disappointments and accomplishments, is now. 

It’s always now.

It’s impossible for it to be anything else. Now exists as the eternal in all of us, because we are all perpetually experiencing it. We color it with our own internal commentary, but it remains, unchanged underneath. It’s our connecting force, because it is in all of us. 

This “now” is the constant in our collective consciousness.

 It could be what some call God.

And if we accept, embrace, trust, and learn to tap into that, then the reality we experience becomes more real. Or maybe better put, you accept the real reality that has always been. 

We can look past what we previously identified as “self” and learn to identify  all those spinning gears that move, often against the flow, in our minds and lives. 

And how to we tap into this now? This being? 

Well, I’m not going to sit here and tell you I got it all figured out. Because dear god is that not true. But, I’m much more at peace, much more present in my life, much more compassionate, and generally more satisfied with my place in this world because I believe I’m on the path to understanding and accepting what being is. It’s right now. And I tap into that through the only way I know how. 

Meditation. 

And there is my Buddhist connection. 

Now we could open up a whole new can of barracudas on the implications of what that means, but I’ll just sum up what Buddhism means to me and the general thesis of what I understand from my experiences with Buddhism. 

Everything changes. Nothing lasts. Meet the present with acceptance and release your cravings and aversions.  

That’s what I’m trying to do. Or what I’m trying to access. There’s a school of thought that says once you acknowledge and accept the impermanence, you’re instantly transported to the stream of being that flows eternal. But that hasn’t been my experience. I call Buddhism and meditation a practice, because I have to do just that. Practice. 

I have to practice meditation and living by the eightfold path. I have to practice identifying negative, or even positive thought patterns. It’s difficult going against all the ways in which my thought process has been wired over 30+ years of living and interacting with society and all that comes with it. 

I’m trying to get real. 

But I’m not saying I’m somehow more real than anyone else. And if you ever hear me saying that, please take a running soccer kick at my organs of generation. I’m trying to make my reality more real. You can choose to do the same if you wish. It’s your life, and just like Project Mayhem, you choose your own level of involvement. 

Now none of this is original. I’m tying together things I’ve learned and studied and trying to make sense of them. This was a another focal point of Hegel’s theories. Learning from those who came before us, and putting together different ideas that come from different people during different eras to make conclusions

And the sum total of my current conclusion is I want the freedom to live my realist reality by means of accessing the stream of constant that is the present.

Or, as Garth Algar said to Wayne Campbell, “LIVE IN THE NOW!” (4)

(1) - Plato’s Republic. Book 9. (380 BCE) 

(2) - Philosophize this! podcast. Episode 76. Hegel’s God. (2016)

(3) - The Power of Now. Chapter 3. Nothing Exists Outside the Now. (1997) 

(4) - Wayne’s World. (1992) 

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own."

I’ve often heard people utter, in subtle judgment, the phrase “He’s not doing well.” It’s a sentence that covers the gamut of possible failures. Maybe it’s in reference to one’s health. This is the only situation where I give a pass to the phrase, and don’t see the need to further extrapolate on that aspect. 

No, what I’m talking about is a snap judgement a person makes summing up another’s life. A calculation of their state of existence. 

Broken up with a loved one?  

 “He’s not taking it well.”

Driving a car in poor repair?   

“She must not be doing well.”

Making declarations of unfair treatment or venting frustrations using the tool of social media? 

“He seems likes he’s not very doing well.”

It’s a bullshit assessment that I find three major flaws in.

1. You assume you have the ability to calculate the sum total of a person’s current life experience based on the small sliver of it you're exposed to.                                                                                  
2. It’s an obvious comparative defense mechanism. They are not doing well. You have made this assessment. Ergo, you are in a position to contrast “not doing well” because you yourself are “doing well”.                                                                                                                                    
3. It operates under the assumption that there is a clear cut and universally recognized way to function and a status quo of criteria one needs to maintain in their life that implies “well”.

This third point is the one I take most exception with. 

Recently, I came to the realization that what has been a factor in driving my days of depression, has been the erroneous acceptance of an established “well” and my perceived lack of achieving this status. The easiest way to identify the conditions of  this “well” is using the metric of financial means. We can externally measure this based on the materials a person owns. 

I drive a $200 scooter I bought over a year ago. It’s got a busted basket on the front. It recently (somehow) got covered in paint, and it’s generally pretty old and beat up. Now, there are plenty of Americans (I’ll pick on my own here) that might see a picture of me driving that scooter over here and think to themselves “Maybe the pay for a teacher isn’t so high in Taiwan. He doesn’t look like he’s doing that well.” 

And there it is. The sum total of me and my condition of “Well” being based solely on the metric of wealth appraised by my means of transportation. 

This, until my recent epiphany, was a means of embarrassment for me. I let it reflect to myself that I wasn’t doing “well". And I thought about it and thought about it and drank coffee and thought about it and came to the simple and obvious conclusion that that was bullshit. Now here, epiphany might be the wrong (and possibly pretentious) word. It’s more of a remembrance. I never judged others based on their financial status. But hitting my 30’s and still not having much in the way of money, coupled with a lack of direction, and no real clear cut career path, I had started to buy in to the American ideal of what a successful life entails. I was failing to live up to being financial “successful” and was reminded about that every time I got on my scooter. This reflection manifested into negative self-perception, and lended its weight to my predisposition of melancholy and a dislike of self. As a younger man, I thought, I knew, that this was a corrupt way of thinking and utter bullshit. But recently? Well...

I had bought into the bullshit. 

And then, in a slow culmination of memories and experience (and a slower firing of my synapses) I thought of all of the people in true and absolute poverty I had seen over the last 2 years. And the smiles they shared. And they families they had and loved. And the humans they were. Same as me. 

Now, if I  judged myself based on financial accumulations,  ipso facto, I was extending that judgment to these people.  And if I wasn’t “doing well”, then these people…. 

Well, fuck that kind of judgment. 

This same idea extends towards people having to endure non-financial related hardships. 

Years back, I had gone through a pretty rough break up. Immature and pernicious things were said by both parties. My ex chose to vent her frustrations and difficulties on social media. My name was not mentioned, but the harsh feelings and difficult experience she was encountering were in full public display. A few days later, a friend said to me “Yeah man, she’s not doing well.” I read his intonation as expressing pitying bemusement and frank judgement. He had just summed up the girl’s current encompassing life experience by the few sentences she had chosen to share publicly. She was failing to reach the “well” benchmark and was therefore not succeeding, if not failing, at life. 

It made me feel better. I was able to utilize external opinion to reenforce my own petty comparative insecurity and find satisfaction by measuring her “wellness” as inferior to my own. 

More bullshit.

What I’m trying to get at, is that the social standard, the ubiquitous “well” in Western culture is at best a confused idea to make sense of the magnitude of experiencing the great unknown that is life, and at worst, a malevolent construct used to judge, compare, classify, and condemn. 

Be it an other's emotional state, financial means,  mechanisms with which they cope with stress or tragedy, or one's current mental state that you are being exposed to, don’t use the social construct of “well” to judge them. Or yourself.  We all exist in a fluid and ephemeral state. Nothing is permanent, and there is no real natural occurring metric that one needs to set as a standard. I’m not advocating an abdication of responsibility for one’s actions, or the idea to welcome stagnation by never pushing yourself past your current state or means, but if you need to use something with which to measure your current state against, use yourself. Try and be better than who you were yesterday. Try to learn from your history (mistakes and failures are fantastic tools and opportunities to learn how to grow), and be “well” in the sense that you’re better than who you were. 

Then you’ll be doing well. 

"The class is Pain 101. Your instructor is Casey Jones."

It’s probably better I waited a fews day after I got back to start writing this. I needed to let the real world materialize in my life again before I could hit this with a bit of objectivity. 

I recently returned from a ten-day meditation course. It’s about an hour from where I live in the city, up in the mountains on the outskirts of Taichung. I spent 10-12 hours a day meditating and learning the practice of Vipassana. 

It was a bizarre and significant experience. 

Let me tell you about it. 

The rules are as follows: 

No murder parties               Don’t kill anything. ( mosquitoes. ants. spiders. flies. no killing                                    whatsoever)

No bullshit parties               No lying. 

No sexy parties                   No sex.  (including solo sexy parties. you know what I mean.) 

No gimme-gimme parties   No stealing. 

No regular parties               No intoxicants. (coffee is allowed. But there was no coffee. so I                               had a few early morning grumpy parties)

My drive there was a nightmare. I drove my beat up scooter through a torrential downpour and quickly discovered my newly purchased “rain jacket” was indeed not waterproof. I was soaked 10 minutes in my hour+ commute. I kept thinking “I should really take my phone out of my pocket and put it some place safe.” But I figured my newly purchased hiking pants were water proof as well, so even though my legs were soaked, I thought it best to just keep on keeping on. About 30 minutes later I stopped to check google maps and discovered my phone was broken. I did the prudent thing of chastising myself for being an idiot for a solid ten minutes, and then set forth strong determination to continue on my journey. I will mediate. Damn it, I must meditate! 

After driving along cluelessly for another 20 minutes, I realized that strong determination doesn’t mean dick if I got no clue where I’m going. 

“Figure it out, Jay. What’s the plan? Driving pointlessly is not a plan.” 

I often internally talk to myself as if I’m not a single entity. Descartes would be pleased. 

I stopped at a Family Mart. I instantly soaked the surrounding area as I tried to make a deal with the clerk, using my questionable Mandarin, to use her cellphone so I could find out where the hell I was going. She quickly left and the manager came out and, in so many words, hinted that she wanted me to continue on my way. 

I drive around for a while and stopped at a 7/11. I had a new plan of attack. 

Offer the clerk money.

 Everybody loves money! 

The young girl clerking laughed nervously and continually shot confused looks at the younger dude clerk beside her as I stuck out a fistful of wet cash and asked to use her phone. She told me she didn't have one.

Right.

 I asked the boy if he did. 

He smiled and said nothing. 

I sat and contemplated my options. 

Turn around and give up?

Fuck that. 

Try and find it from memory?

Not a chance. 

Go home, look up the address and route, and try again? 

I only have an hour before sign in time is over. No way I’ll make it. 

I must have looked pathetic. A lonely foreigner soaked to his bones sitting with head in hands at an empty booth in a 7/11 in the boondocks of Taiwan. 

Turns out that was a pretty good plan itself. The young girl took pity on me. She walked over, offering me a cellphone lying in the palms of her outstretched hands. It was like being bestowed a mystical object with which I could complete my quest. A tablet of runes, which I could present to the ancient doors that barred my entrance. 

Maybe I’m a nerd… 

I found the address using Google maps on her phone and showed her the place I wanted to go. 

“Can you tell me how to get there? Which way do I turn on 128?”

She told me to 等一下 (wait a minute) and went and made a phone call. When she came back in, she went directly behind the counter and started attending to the line of impatient looking customers that had started to accumulate.

I sat. Confused and cold. 

Soon, a man walked in and barked out something indecipherable (to me) in Mandarin. The girl pointed at me. The man motioned me to follow him.  I did. 

We stood outside looking at his car in the downpour. The girl had called me a cab. I still had my scooter.

What to do? 

30 more minutes of following a cab on my scooter in the freezing rain, (less agitated, but shivering and chattering) and I arrived at the spot. 

I quickly found my room, toweled off, changed, and completed the sign-in application and listened to a brief session on the rules.

In order to help the students avoid lying, a practice called “Nobel Silence” is enforced. 

No speaking. 

More so, no communication of any kind is allowed. No hand gestures. No mild grunts. You're not even allowed to make eye contact. 

What on earth was I doing here? 

A few small groups of men (sexes were immediately separated) had formed and I heard English and Chinese being spoken. I thought it best not to get friendly or learn any names before I started the course. Don’t need any more temptation to talk. 

We were summoned into the main hall, given a brief talk (via stereo system) and mediated for a few hours before we retired to bed at 9:00 PM. 

9:00 PM seems a touch early. 

Oh, we have to get up at 4:00 AM every morning. 

9:00 PM seems a little late. 

Bells tolled, signaling bedtime. 

I developed a strange conditioning to those bells. (more on that later.) 

Halfway through the next day and I thought I was going to loose my mind. Tired. Confused. Sore from sitting. Stuck in a room with a bunch of strangers remaining silent for hours.

I can’t do this.

 A strange wave of fear and panic slowing started washing over me like the tide coming in. How could sitting in a room meditating cause anxiety? 

I don’t know, but it sure as hell did. 

I went to bed, uncertain if I could complete what I started. 

Day 2 was worse. A giant piece of paper on the men’s side bulletin board largely displayed the words “TODAY IS DAY 2” 

8 more days. Fuck. I don’t know if I can do this. 

The bell tolled. We walked like zombies to our rooms. 

That bell. It was like John Donne’s proverbial bell, clanging solemnly into the silence. No questions needed, John.

I knew exactly for whom it was tolling. 

Halfway through day 3 and I was feeling ok. Difficult or not, I’m sticking with this. How could I face my buddies with the knowledge that I couldn’t hack a 10-day meditation course? Hell, Wolverine wouldn’t bail. Wolverine kicks ass and meditates all damn day!

 “Be like Wolverine, Jay.”

That’s been a mantra of mine since I was 11.

The technique of the first 3 days was called Anapana. You focus exclusively on your breathing. You don’t try to change or control it; you just watch it as it enters and exits and you bring your mind back when it wonders. Let me tell you guys, my mind wanders. A lot. Usually to negative places. 

Halfway through day 3, I can’t focus on my breath, so I decide to nickname all the guys I’m with. Those names are a lot of useless information to share. No point point in telling you.

Here are their nicknames. 

Doc                                                    The Blacksmith                                Tim Tim

Dudley Moops                                   Johnny Nunchucks                          Tom Tom

Sinead                                               Gramps                                             Monk

Chipmunk                                          Ninja Aladdin                                    Mr. Williamson 

Sanjuro                                              Douglas Peterson                             Pappy 

Day 4 we begin the actual practice of Vipassana. 

You take the focus that you’ve gathered from the 3 days previous and use that acute attention to feel sensation in your body. Start at your head, go to your toes, make your way back up, and repeat for 10-12 hours. 

Every night ended in a video discourse from the (now deceased) original teacher. He ensured this had nothing to do with practicing a religion and was solely a technique to eradicate suffering in day-to-day life. (My attention was scattered holes from a shotgun blast. I tried my best to listen.) By looking in you become aware of yourself. By sustaining that look, you can achieve understanding of yourself. Using that understanding, you can learn to tame your mind. Doing so allows you to operate free from detrimental thinking patterns and needless suffering. This was Siddhartha Gautama’s original practice.

So they said.

Day 5. More of the same. Wake up, mediate 2 hours, eat, mediate 3 hours, eat, meditate 5 hours, tea, meditate 1 hour, video discourse, meditate 1 hour, sleep.

I’m a creature of habit. I was hitting my stride. I was feeling better. I could definitely do this. 

Day 6 we found out that three times a day we had to start sitting for an hour without moving whatsoever. 

I can’t do this. 

Days 7. Turns out I can.

All it takes it a little extreme discomfort 3 times a day.

Not to worry though. Each session is proceeded by a message from the O.G.

“Accept your state. Treat pleasure and pain as the same and don’t prefer either. Establish EQUANIMITY." (a word repeated endlessly during the course) 

Oh, that’s all I have to do? Cool, Wait, this hurts like fuck. What’s that? Be equanimous? Right. Sorry. I forgot. Hey, now my back is really.. Huh? Right. Equanimous. Got it. Thanks. 

[SIDEBAR: The conditions in the main meditation hall where a clear-cut demonstration of the difference between men and women. 45 women on their side of the room, and besides the occasional stifled cough, or shift to find comfort (hey! be equanimous, you!), the woman’s side remained mostly quiet and dignified.

Then there were the men. 15 salty dogs. Together blaring a chorus of unmitigated bodily function. Burps, coughs, throat clearing, sighing, grunting, it assaulted the room in a barrage of bold remorselessness. And the farting. Good god, the farting. A cacophony of flatulence spattered the quiet. 

These shameless men were singing a song of organic inconsideration. I quickly joined the band.]

Back to the story.

Day 8 was the game changer. I sat, midday, in the hall, and a warm sense of pink and blue washed over me and my whole body vibrated in unison. For a few seconds, my mind went quiet. Complete silence. I opened my eyes and the world materialized slowly and I felt still and wonderful. I wanted this. Dear god, this was it. The teachers voice internally interrupted the silence in my mind. “Don’t seek pleasure. Don’t crave comfort. Don’t avoid suffering. Except it all with equanimity.”  

I felt guilty for wanting it to continue and the self-chastising began anew. I realized that this was the other end of the spectrum. Don’t give hate or misery power either. Stay even. Consider Buddha’s “middle-path.” 

I went the rest of the day without any remarkable happenings. 

Day 9. Tomorrow was my last day. I know this because the big sign declared TODAY IS DAY 9. 

I felt ok. Fuck it, I felt great. When the bell rang, it was now like it was signaling recess. I didn't waste time stretching or meandering. I made a beeline to the hall. Not with alacrity, but with a sense of duty. This was the path I was now walking. 

Day 10 arrived and we were allowed to speak. I asked the nearest Westerner (ten days without using Mandarin made me a little weary of trying to use it.) how he felt and we quickly fell into a long discussion about what had happened and how we felt. I had to say, I felt probably the best I ever had in my entire life. Not full of joy and bursting with happiness. Just even and accepting. Everything that was happening was what was currently happening. No other way it needed to be. That’s the best I can describe it.  I drank the cool-aid.

I finished my conversation with Doc and went to find Johnny Nunchucks. He had been my roommate for 10 days of no communication, time to say hi. Time to attempt mandarin. A brief stint into our conversation and Woodchuck basically ran at me. 

“你知道什麼功夫”      ＊”What kung fu do you know?”

I laughed a little. He had apparently been impressed with my daily stretch routine. 

I wanted to say “YouTube-Fu”, but I figured the joke would be lost. I told him Muay Thai. 

I’ve only been practicing it once a week for four months, but hey, not lying, right? 

We all exchanged numbers and I was on my way. 

On the drive home, the weather was close to perfect and the sun shone as I drove down the mountain. Everything felt ok. 

I found it an apropos metaphor for what I had just experienced. Rain, anxiety, uncertainty on the way up. Sun, calm, equanimity on the way down. 

CHEEEEEEESSSSEEEEEE BAAALLLLLL 

I drove back into Taichung with elation. Everybody had to hear about this. Everybody needed to try this.

How could I explain it to my friends and family without sounding like a brainwashed lunatic cult member? 

I put together the following metaphor.

 It’s the best I can do to sum it up. 

Take it or leave it.

 For as long as I can remember, my mind has been like a broken record player. The counterweight malfunctioned long ago, and the same track has been repeating and repeating. The name of that track is Useless Negative Bullshit. It plays behind everything I think. I can turn the volume up and down with some help and effort, but I can never turn it off. With what I had just experienced, what I had just learned, I was able to lift that needle, if only for a few seconds or minutes, and experience complete silence for the first time. Don’t get me wrong, when the needle drops again (and it always drops again) the song continues playing. But those few instances proved to be invaluable, and a possible indication of what may come if I continue this practice. 

I’ve been back a few days, and although the initial honeymoon is over and the daily grind is back in play, I still feel, well…different. 

Better. 

I’m not going to push this on anybody. I’ll just end this by saying, if you suffer from anger, depression, anxiety, insomnia or things of that nature (I certainly do), perhaps you ought to consider checking Vipassana out. 

It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not an instant elixir. It’s not a cure-all. 

It’s a way to navigate hardship, and hopefully, live a better life. 

At least that’s how I feel right now.

Here’s a link to check it out. There are centers all around the world. 

https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index

See ya in the funny pages. 

*We were able to talk a little bit to the volunteers (this thing is completely donation based. They don’t expect lots of money. Give what you can) and to the assistant teacher. He lead the sessions and answered questions at specific times each day.

**I'm currently writing this with a headache and a shallow feeling of the blues. No prompt panacea, folks. Just a little more knowledge gathered that life is always changing. Do what you can. Accept what you have to.  Nothing lasts forever. 

*** I killed lots of mosquitoes.