Peeling the Onion

I rang in the new year at a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Turns out it was a great way to avoid getting sick, since everyone had to be vaccinated and tested, and then we were quite effectively cloistered together in a bubble. The retreat was one of the S. N. Goenka retreats, and it was only fifteen miles from my house in 29 Palms. In fact, I had intended to walk there from my house, since that's kind of my thing, but my PCR results were not back in time, so instead I spent the morning of arrival day stressing about that and just had Amy drive and drop me off instead.

More importantly, wait, what? Garret went to a meditation retreat? Is this the same embittered ex-Mormon now-atheist anti-anything-spiritual-or-supernatural burn-it-all-down-with-statistics Garret we all know and fear that we're talking about here? 

Indeed.

My main motivations are that I want my college brain back, I'd like to get off the hedonic treadmill, and I'd like to be more present. In college a History of Civilization professor mentioned offhand that Xenephon was one of Ben Franklin's favorite thinkers, so one night I was bored, went to the library, and read a bunch of Xenephon's Memorabilia. (No, no I did not have a girlfriend at the time, why do you ask?) Another time I heard that a movie called Brokeback Mountain was going to come out, and there was a lot of buzz, and it was based on a New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx. So I went to the library, got the physical copy of the magazine, and read the story. Nowadays I think the Internet has broken my brain. If Brokeback came out today, I might get as far as clicking a link in the Reddit post I was reading to open a new tab in my browser with the New Yorker short story, but I absolutely would not be able to read the story from start to finish. The unread tab would float around (I have 19 open as I'm typing this) for a few weeks until I admitted my failure, closed it, and forgot about it.

As for the hedonic treadmill: I have a well-paying, stable job. I buy things with my income. I am doing well. But am I satisfied with it, or am I always craving more? There are lots of examples, but here's just one. We moved to California with only Amy's fairly crappy set of kitchen knives. I enjoy cooking very much. I also truly enjoy the feeling of using a well-made tool that is appropriate for the job. So I bought a nice Shun santoku knife. Chopping that first onion with it was delightful. But then my brain immediately moved on to something else. Chopping a red pepper or a tomato with it isn't quite as nice, given their thick skin. That might be best with a good serrated knife. Maybe I need one of those. Ooh, but you know what, there's a sale, so why don't I just get a nakiri vegetable cleaver and a chef's knife while I'm at it? Oh and this top-rated paring knife is only $9? Let's get that too. Once you upgrade one thing, you've got to upgrade everything else so it doesn't suck by comparison. Hedonic treadmill goes vroom.

   

Gotta get 'em all!

As for being present, while I still have a slight aversion to the phrase (see also: mindfulness), there's no good reason for that. It's an absolute reality that I spend an inordinate amount of time, including my time spent running and hiking in beautiful places, rehearsing arguments with friends and family that will never happen, stewing over perceived slights or disagreements. Hiking the Hayduke Trail last year, in the most gorgeous and otherworldly canyons of the Colorado Plateau, I was thinking "I can't believe X is a NIMBY. That's so stupid that they spoke against a permitting variance for that apartment building on their block. Don't they know that parking minimums are the root of all evil?!" Correct as my assessment might be, is it useful? Even on an issue that really does truly directly effect me--because of my failure to click a single box on my application to my current job, I have, for the rest of my life forfeited a 10% salary raise, and am one of the least-well paid people in similar roles there--even though this is true, there is nothing I can do about it, especially while on vacation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So look up, there's a literal river shooting out of a sheer cliff hundreds of feet above the ground. Enjoy it!

Thunder River

So yeah, is there anything I can do about this? And wait, isn't running meditative and don't I do a ton of that? Yes, I run a lot, but I don't think it's meditative. It's certainly not deliberately meditative much of the time. I listen to books on tape when I'm running, or I get in argumentative loops with people who aren't present about trivial minutia just like while hiking. I think there's a material difference between people saying "running is my meditation" (or gardening or crafting or listening to podcasts or hiking or or or ...) and actually meditating. Are you observing your own mind as closely as possible? 

In my second year of grad school at the nadir of my emotional experience, I attended some group counseling sessions, and the therapist taught us some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. Essentially, when I was thinking about how miserable grad school was ("I hate this with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns") I was supposed to observe that thought, and then think something along the lines of "OK but is that useful?" I can't remember how I came across it (it was almost certainly a podcast) but I bought Dan Harris' book 10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics and brought it with me on my Hayduke Trail hike. He spent the first half of the book ripping Eckhart Tolle, The Secret, and Deepak Chopra new a**holes and generally tried to limit the grandiosity of his claims, so I connected with it and enjoyed the book.

I started practicing small amounts of meditation (15 minutes would be a long day) and listening to other audiobooks and podcasts: Waking Up by Sam Harris, Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright, Secular Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor. Harris claimed there was a lot more to meditation than becoming 10% happier. Maybe not all the way to enlightenment, but you could expect major changes if you just realized that there is no self. I didn't understand what it meant that there is no self, nor did I understand what the implication was even if it was true, but it was really interesting. Robert Wright laid out a simple, science-based, and convincing argument (as least as well as any popular science journalist can do) of why secular Buddhism works. Stephen Batchelor was a bunch of flowery word salad drivel that I loathed and gained nothing from.

Anyway, there's a pandemic. We move across the country, I read, I meditate a tiny bit, and the holidays are coming up, why don't I do a retreat like all the authors mention, and see what the fuss is all about? A friend had done a Goenka retreat years ago really enjoyed it. I looked them up, I read the Google reviews ("It's a cult!"), I read several first-hand accounts ("It's not a cult. They mention reincarnation but you don't have to believe it. Also there were lots of spiders.") and decided that enough atheist Sam Harris fans were also fans of the Goenka retreats that it must be fine. If it wasn't, it was free and I walked there from my house, so I could get up and leave any time. New Year's seemed like a nice time to do it (fresh start) and a way to use the holidays to spend one less day of PTO, and at a time when, given the winter weather, I wouldn't be doing something awesome outdoors, which is pretty much the opportunity cost of doing anything for me.

I had some hesitation as the start approached after an episode of Decoding the Gurus podcast where the hosts (two academics who like to dissect the nonsense spewed by Intellectual Dark Web podcasters) had a discussion with Sam Harris. The hosts were skeptical of some of Sam's claimed benefits and takeaways from meditation because it's all internal to one's own mind and therefore unverifiable externally. Sam's response could be boiled down to "so is the retinal blind spot, but I believe that's real." This was still bugging me, mostly because as a former-Mormon, I was raised to think that I could get an internal verification (via the Holy Spirit) of the veracity of The Book of Mormon by reading it and praying about it. I did that, felt something, and for 10 years thought I'd completed some sort of reliable test. I discussed this with a fellow raised-religious now-atheist friend and he said that internal experiences can be valid, but they don't necessarily prove anything about the external world--that has to depend on external evidence. Getting a good feeling from The Book of Mormon doesn't mean that horses, elephants, wheat, steel, and chariots(!) existed in pre-1492 Americas. Nor does it mean that a man propositioning a 14-year old girl by telling her that an angel with a flaming sword told him that he had to practice polygamy or be killed is anything other than a despicable lie, even if he did produce the book I once felt good about. So check the external structure around the internal phenomenon you observe, I guess. Meditation's claims that "You can concentrate better, be nicer, enjoy the present more, and you might feel like there is no self" seem pretty harmless even if were to turn out they were misinterpreting the data somehow. 

Getting Started

So off I went. Amy dropped me off, I checked in, texted friends to say I'd be out of contact for 10 days, surrendered my phone and wallet, and began the retreat on December 29. You're not allowed to keep your phone or access the outside world in any fashion (pretty nice during a pandemic), and you're not supposed to even take notes or write a journal, so most of what follows is from memory, but a bunch of the basics are openly described on their website (dhamma.org).

The first evening started with dinner and an orientation meeting, then we were assigned our permanent meditation spots in the main hall, we made some vows and did our first meditation session. We committed to a strict code of silence (Noble Silence); I think we also committed to not leaving until the 10 days are up, to staying strictly within the property boundary, and to adhere to strict separation of the sexes. 

The vows are:

1. to abstain from killing any being;
2. to abstain from stealing;
3. to abstain from all sexual activity;
4. to abstain from telling lies;
5. to abstain from all intoxicants.

These are all on their website, and you have to read and sign them when you're checking in, so I feel like they did a pretty good job with informed consent. (Unlike, say, the Mormon temple ceremony where you make promises you are not told about in advance, you used to pantomime slitting your own throat if you broke any of these promises, and an old man touched you below your belly button while you were wearing nothing but a sheet over your head open from the sides... so to me the meditation retreat felt positively on the up and up). One man did leave the retreat early, so it's not like they do anything insane to keep you there. It's just an arduous mental effort, not a fun vacation, so if you're not up for it, you leave. 

The student body was fairly diverse. There were about 25-30 men, and a similar number or few more women. I think the center can hold a few more people than that, but likely due to Covid complications, they didn't fill it to the brim. The men were about half white, the other half South Asian, East Asian, with a couple Blacks. The women seemed like half white, half East Asian (though the separation of the sexes was strict, so I mostly only saw them out of the side of my eye in the main meditation hall.) At least half the men were first-time Goenka retreat students, the others had done as many as 5 previous retreats. They for sure had better sitting posture, and they were seated at the front of the meditation hall. I would guess I was slightly towards the older end of the spectrum, with maybe a half dozen 50+ men and a majority thirty-somethings.

The next 10 days all followed the same schedule: 

4:00 am		Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am		Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am		Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 am		Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am		Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00 noon		Lunch break
12 noon-1:00 pm		Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm		Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm		Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm		Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm		Tea break
6:00-7:00 pm		Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm		Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm		Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm		Question time in the hall
9:30 pm		Retire to your own room--Lights out

Yep, that's 11 hours of meditation a day--12 if you count the discourses. From a blog entry I'd read I was aware that the physical task of sitting comfortably was going to be a challenge. So I made sure to grab a variety of extra cushions and a stool on day two. There are enough to go around, but pickings got a little slim by the end because meditation spots don't change so everyone left their cushions in the same spot all week.

The meditation is either in the main group meditation hall or in your own room. Rooms are mostly small single rooms with private bathrooms, though I think younger students are actually in a building with double rooms. The buildings have 8 (12?) rooms each. Then there's the dining room, and a walking path. You go between your room, the dining hall, the meditation hall, and a 1/5 mile walking loop, and that's it. There's also the teachers residence, the women's half of the complex, and the kitchen staff quarters, but you're not supposed to go there. The grounds are small, but they're really nice (thank God). I spent a lot of time observing desert fauna, and actually gathered a small quantity of fallen seeds during the breaks to plant in my greenhouse. I surrendered my smartphone, but my only watch is my Coros GPS watch, so I did record a few of my walking laps and uploaded them to Strava when the course was over. No running, just walking. 

Landscaping

Meditation Hall

Meditation Hall cleaned and ready for next retreat

My building

My room

I like the desert

The Food

Meals were... well, they were meals. They're advertised as simple vegetarian meals, and they are that. They say they can't accommodate other diets, but it was extremely easy to be strictly vegan, and gluten free, Kosher, Halal I think would all have been easy as well. On the last day when Noble Silence was over, I was having a conversation about the food, and I was about to start ripping into it ("So bland!") but kept my mouth shut because everyone else raved about it ("Did you know the recipes are all online?!").  Why would you ever steam a vegetable when you could roast it? Does your oven not get hot enough? Are you unaware that olive oil and salt exist? Garlic? Onions? My conclusion is that even as a vegan, I and many of my elitist Bay Area friends eat really well, even better than other people I thought would have been food snobs too, and when serving a large number of people, bland is the way to make it palatable to the largest number.

Full breakfast, full lunch, dinner is just tea and fruit. On day three when I walked in for breakfast and the hot item was the same oatmeal with stewed prunes, and would be the same every day, my hear sank to the floor, but there was also corn flakes, granola, yogurt, and toast with butter, peanut butter, and jam, so it was fine. Lunch was always different, with a main, multiple sides, vegetables, and a respectable salad bar. 

There were nine types of teas or coffee that were always available at all meals. Amy and I love the morning coffee ritual (she even more than me) so she grinds beans by hand in our Japanese grinder every morning and makes French press or moka pot every day. Going in, I was worried that I had gotten hooked on caffeine, as I had started drinking it every morning instead of just a few times a week. However at the retreat I didn't feel the need for caffeine. Importantly, the only coffee was Folger's instant. I tried it once and it was (obviously) awful, like burnt aluminum. There a Postum-like coffee alternative, but that was even more disgusting, like burnt black carbon toast shavings. And it has no caffeine, so what is the point? I tried the black and green tea, but they didn't taste nearly as good as the herbal teas, and I was getting up every hour during the night to pee, so I cut caffeine to zero to try and help with that (it didn't work.) Anyway, don't expect good coffee. But maybe don't expect to need it like you do in regular life?

The Meditation

Arrival was day zero. Then days one and two were about focusing on the breath (Anapana meditation). It's not a breathing exercise, you just observe your breath (through your nose; no mouth-breathing). When your mind wanders (which it will), just notice that and return your attention to your breath. Don't berate yourself, just begin again. "Smilingly, begin again." If you need to, to clear your mind you can take a few deliberately slightly heavier breaths, but really, just breath normally and observe that. All day for at least two days. With an N-95 mask on.

On day three we switched to focusing on sensation in the small area around your nose above your upper lip.

Then day four through day nine were Vipassana, which to Goenka means body scanning. All body-scanning, all day. That means you are aware of physical sensations on a specific part of your body. You're just aware of it. Don't crave good sensations, don't be averse to bad sensations. Just be OK with it, or in Goenka's terminology, be equanimous. Be aware, and be equanimous, and notice that the sensation will change, or go away, because everything changes. Everything is impermanent. Day four it was each part, part by part, from head to toe. Day five it went to head to toe and then back up, toes back to your head. Then day six it went from individual part by part to sensing multiple parts of your body at the same time, symmetricly, like both upper arms, or both sides of your chest. Then day seven we started mixing in flow with the part by part scanning. Just flowing symmetrically down your body and back up. Then day eight it was more flow. Day nine was more flow. Down and back up. Down and back up. Oh and by the way you might enter this state called banga where your sense of self completely dissolves. And then day ten we were basically done but at the end of each session you can add a little Metta (loving-kindness). We went home on day 11.

Sounds like a lot of meditation, right? It was. 

The breathing (Anapana) days were fine for me, except that obviously my mind wanders and I start thinking about whatever stupid policy at work I disagree with, or how Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema suck (actually I lucked out and didn't think about them at all, I don't think, but work policies for sure). But that's just what happens. I'm kind of used to that. Just begin again. I was a little concerned the N-95 mask would be a crutch, since it clearly makes sensations and breath on your face easier to notice, but that ended up not being a big deal.

The scanning I was not used to. The guided meditation I've heard on apps from Joseph Goldstein, for example, instructs you to just notice whatever you notice about any of the physical sensations in your body, not to go in any deliberate order, and it also instructs you to pay attention to sounds, or things you see (even though your eyes are closed). So this deliberate down, up, down up, top of my head, forehead, eyebrows, nose, lips, chin, throat, left shoulder, left pec, right pec, abs, etc. etc. (see I can't even type them all out) down, up, down up down up downup downupdownup downupdownupdownup was exhausting. So exhausting. So hard. I wasn't sure I was doing it right. Are you sure we're not supposed to observe sounds? Are you sure we're not supposed to do this outside? Is this working? Is this thing on? Hello?

The sitting I was not used to. That should be obvious from my near-complete lack of meditation experience or bodily flexibility (I run but I don't stretch). Starting with day four, as soon as we started Vipassana, we also started doing three "Sittings of Strong Determination" each day, meaning that the main three group meditation sessions 8:00am, 2:30pm, and 6:00pm, you were not supposed to move your arms, hands, or legs, nor open your eyes for the entire hour. Before we got to that point, my back was getting pretty sore, so I asked if I could sit against the back wall. They suggested I try a back-jack floor chair first (imagine a fairly sturdy bleacher chair), and that totally solved it. They initially placed it on top of a cushion, and I had to figure out that you should really put it directly on the floor, otherwise it will lean too far back, but because of this chair, the Strong Determination sitting was not a problem. 

Perhaps this even made it too easy, since while scanning I wasn't sure I was doing it right, and often felt like I was feeling nothing, but you're not supposed to search for a sensation, or any specific sensation, and so I'm sensing nothing, and my mind is wandering, and wait, my eyeballs are moving in their socket in the direction of the part I'm scanning, so am I doing this on an entirely incorrect physical level when it's all supposed to be mental? What is going on? Is this hour up yet? It's got to be close, right? C'mon, man, it's got to be! I've done three complete scans and went off on at least three fantasy thought spirals, it's got to be at least 45 minutes right? We're close, buddy, just hang in there.

So through midday on day nine, I was thinking this really wasn't for me. First, this was Buddhist Buddhist meditation: the sensations you're feeling are caused by sankhara that come from your past lives. That literal reincarnation teaching is what leads to a few negative online reviews, but I was prepared for that, and Goenka even says when he introduces the idea that you don't really have to believe it--you've got plenty of garbage built up from your own current life that you've got more than enough work to do--and no one at the retreat actually said anything dependent on that belief, so that wasn't a big mental stumbling block for me. Second, this was Goenka meditation. SN Goenka is just one guy, that's his name. Or was, since he passed away in 2013. But he is still the star of the show. There were two assistant teachers at the front of the room, one man, one woman. Mostly all they did wait until everyone was seated, then press play on an audio recording of instruction or a video discourse from Goenka himself. They also control the lights in the meditation hall. Mostly they press play, then when it's over they conduct things by saying "All students may now continue to meditate here or in their own rooms" or "Take a short break, then return for tonight's discourse." Slightly less than once a day they do have about four students come up at a time and they ask you how the specific meditation practice of the day is going, and you can get two or three sentences of instruction. You can also ask questions one on one after lunch, where you get at most five minutes. (You're allowed to speak to the instructor, and there's also a returning student acting as course manager in case your toilet is clogged or the heater stopped working or whatever, you're just not allowed to talk to, touch, or make eye contact with the other regular students).

So all the instruction is coming from Goenka. The discourses (evening video lectures) were filmed in 1991. The camerawork is atrocious. They zoom in and cut off his gesturing hands, realize they zoomed in on the wrong spot, and yank the camera to the side. He clears his throat. He sniffles. He coughs. Students in the 1991 audience cough. I know dealing with distraction is part of the game, but part of the instruction also specifically says not to meditate outside, nor with your eyes open, because the slightest breeze is too distracting. Well, terrible AV quality pleghmy coughing snorts are also distracting. And who is this Goenka fellow? He seems nice enough, but there's clearly multiple takes on Vipassana meditation, both the theory and the practice, and we're not getting any diversity of opinion, it's just all Goenka, all body-scanning, all the time. There's also chanting, or what sounds to me like a fat man's death rattle. For half an hour in the morning (but thankfully you can meditate in your room instead for that session) and for about five minutes at the beginning and/or end of many other sessions. It does not sound good. The tempo will change seemingly randomly, or there will be random periods of silence lulling you into thinking it's over before BBBBBBBBBB! an obese person is having respiratory issues over the PA system again. And there's no attempt to translate almost any of what is chanted, so I just suffered.

Lastly, the gender stuff is a little weird. There are two assistant teachers, one man, one woman, and the woman assistant teacher will address the women, and answers their questions, but never speaks to the male students. The male assistant teacher, however, addresses all students. And Goenka's discourses start with him and his wife sitting on a dais, but she never moves, nor says anything, and he (maybe, English isn't his first language, so who knows) makes a fat joke about her in one of them. Later I was told that there's no rule about lead assistant teachers always being male, that's just the way the seniority rule played out in our situation. But given that there's no explanation for any of this, and next to no opportunity to discuss it, that's what many fellow new students assumed.

So I'm barely hanging in there. Every morning, My alarm goes off at 4am and I think, "I don't have to be meditating till 4:30, surely I could have slept 20 more minutes" but I eventually get out of bed, do a quick prison workout of pushups, squats, and jumping jacks. (Exercise isn't forbidden, though running is, and there's just nowhere to do it, really, but they do have a few spare yoga mats you can use in your room.) Then I'd meditate. I nodded off a few times meditating in my room, but never for whole sessions. I just thought, OK, this might be the only chance I get at this, I'm not going to quit, and those 7 days of PTO you had to use are gone, so sack up and do this! Back a little straighter, a few slightly harder breaths to return focus, and I'm back to scanning. 

I had a couple nice experiences, but mostly carefully observing nature, not while meditating itself. A hummingbird and I had a close encounter. The bees loved this one flowering tree. The stars were incredible (it's the desert and we were right around a new moon). Best of all I left a meditation session and observed two rabbits playing, and kissing, then scampering away. Very nice, but the scanning wasn't doing it for me.

Then day nine. It was the last full day of Vipassana; we'd been told it was our last full day to work hard, and that we'd be taught a new technique on day 10. The afternoon sitting of strong determination mostly went OK. I felt pretty happy, and I thought about Norm MacDonald's moth joke, and I almost started giggling because I couldn't for the life of me remember the punchline. Isn't it something about a pun to do with the word "lepidopterist"? (No.) Mostly things were good but not great. Can't I be observing sound too? Is it bad that my eyes are moving inside my head? Is this thing on? 

Then, with five minutes to go, at the end of the session, Goenka's chanting came on the PA, and I disappeared. My self completely dissolved. I was a many ton rock, or just part of the massive Earth, or maybe just a void, immovable, but shimmering. For the few minutes of chanting, I was gone. When it was done and people getting up to take a break, well, oh no! someone is going to have to come and move me, because I can't move myself because I don't exist anymore. Finally enough distractions occurred that I existed again. I stood outside in shock for a few minutes, then returned to meditating. I felt an energy going up and down, and then at the end of the session the gong rang for tea and the sound traveled through me not like regular sound waves, but like vibrations or wave it really is. I walked outside and saw the tail end of a shimmering sunset and thought "Wait, there are drugs that make your self disappear? Why are we not all taking those all the time?!" I went to dinner and had an amazing apple (also a very bad under-ripe banana) but I was enjoying that apple like Emil Hirsch in that scene in Into the Wild. After tea there were two more sessions. My legs felt like vibrations and I sensed a flow up and down my whole body. Then I remembered an instruction the Goenka had said only once or twice--to try sensing inside your body instead of on the surface, like in your spine. Holy shit my spine. I plugged it in and it lit up glowing. Any time there was chanting, instead of my usual negative reaction to hearing an obese man die slowly, I just felt vibrations and welcomed them to the party. When people in the room coughed or made a noise, it was as if parts of the same whole were communicating.

At 9:00pm when meditating was all over I walked several laps around the path to try and digest what had just happened. Well, for sure I'm going to have to be less judgmental when people say "vibrations" or "energy," because even if "sending you good vibrations!" might not do anything, it certainly felt like it did, or at least I couldn't think of any better words to describe it. Maybe people who are high sound dumb to sober people, even though those same sober people would use the same words to describe the event if they themselves got high. And is this all elevation emotion? I haven't read the psychology literature (Jonathon Haidt seems to have popularized the term, and there's a number of papers in the Journal of Positive Psychology), but ex-mormons love to talk about how the Holy Spirit is just elevation emotion, an observable and explainable, if understudied phenomenon. Maybe this was that too? It follows the same outline of a group setting with some positive moral teachings and expectations of some sort of altered mental state after a difficult test. And maybe when I was a Mormon missionary and everybody would blow me off by saying there's more than one way to get to the top of a mountain, GTFO with this one-true-path nonsense, maybe they're on to something because the top is this feeling?

I had trouble sleeping. Did they break my brain? Am I going to get my old one back? Can I continue to be a normal person?

Finally the next morning we were taught Metta (loving-kindness) meditation and the first couple times I said the mantra "May all beings be happy, may all beings be peaceful, may all being be liberated," I really felt it. No saccharine, just bliss, and I wanted every being to have it. We only did a little meditation that day, Noble Silence ended, my brain returned to my usual (ab)normal, and we finally introduced ourselves to each other. Assumptions I'd made about people based on their clothing was incorrect (e.g. guy wearing a hat from an ultra-marathon was not an ultra-marathoner, older British guy with a scarf I turned into an older Brad Pitt from Seven Years in Tibet turned out to be from New Zealand). We had a really nice time talking. No one else seems to have completely dissolved (at least this week--some had on previous retreats), but people had very good experiences, and it was helpful to finally be able to talk to people and hash out your understanding of what was going on. People on the board of the center came and pitched us on donating and staying involved, we had dinner, we did a little more vipassana with a dash of metta at the end of the session, we picked clean-up tasks for the final day, and went to bed. I slept well.

End, Re-Entry

Early the next morning we watched one final discourse video (Keep it going! Two hours of meditation a day!) and one final meditation session. I was still digging the vipassana, but I was back to my usual critical self during the metta, because Goenka's version is a lot of sloooooooooooooooooooooow chanting. Sooooooo slow. May allllllllllllllllllllll being be haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaappy. With random length breaks such that you might think he's done, but no, wait he's back, and now wait, it's just audio, but you can tell he's getting up and walking out of the room--instead of just editing the master to turn down the volume, you get to hear him walk out of a room slowly in 1991. Despite my normal negativity about that I was very much enjoying being around people, so I arranged a ride home with one of the many people heading west to LA rather than walking home so I could chat for longer. I walked several laps around the whole complex, including the women's and teacher's areas that I never been to, and went home and played with the dogs.

It's now been five days. I had the house to myself for a day, which was probably good. I worked in the greenhouse all afternoon Sunday, had a stressful interaction at the dog park and maybe handled it better than I would have previously but clearly wasn't ready for it. Monday there was immediately a very difficult situation at work where I felt I needed to take a firm stance against management on something. I think I handled it well,but it was not enjoyable. An old student told me they'd learned through experience it was best to take a day off at home before going back to work; that's quite likely a good idea. Anyway, it turns out there's still a pandemic, so there's nowhere to go. I've been busy writing code for the race lottery I run, and apparently I need to decide whether I want to buy rooftop solar panels right now because the state utilities commission is going to neuter the incentives at the end of the month. I still haven't had coffee or alcohol. Dry January? Life goes on.

Am I glad I did it? Absolutely.

Would I do it again? Yes, but I think I might try a different, i.e. non-Goenka, retreat center next, e.g. Insight Meditation Center, Insight Meditation Society, InsightLA, or Spirit Rock (I'm going to try and react to that name with equanimity). A lot of people repeat Goenka retreats, but it would be the exact same instruction; same audio, same videos. It would almost certainly produce a different result, but other retreats include at least a little walking meditation, which sounds like it would appeal to me. Goenka emphasized that meditation should be a practice, not an intellectual curiosity, so you shouldn't bounce around from practice to practice but instead stick with one and just do it. He did say trying two or three things before settling down was fine, but more importantly, I never agreed to use only his method, so I can do whatever I want.

Would I recommend it? Yes. One of ~30 people left early and everyone I spoke with at the end had a positive experience. I don't recommend it for everyone; I might have recommended it for ever fewer had I not experienced dissolution, and I want to be clear that you might not experience it, you probably won't get there if you crave it, and I may never experience it again (especially if I crave it), but still it was a worthwhile experience. It's very difficult though. Not for the faint of heart.

Anything I'd do differently? I'd bring my own yoga mat for exercising in my room, and I'd bring slippers since you're constantly taking your shoes on and off before going into the meditation hall.

Oh, and what does it mean that there is no self?  There is no rider on the horse. The way I understand it, there is no single point, no massless one-dimensional point in your brain that controls your thoughts or actions. At best, there's a bunch of competing areas of the brain fighting for control, you can do objective lab experiments that show just plain bananas things occurring when one part of your brain experiences something and another doesn't, and consciousness is not very well understood and it feels like it comes from a single point inside your skull, but that's not clear. There is no soul, and there is no secular version of it; we're all just collections of particles that are all connected somehow. Side note, there may not be free will. Feel free to think everything I just wrote is word salad, it's better experienced anyway. 

Okay but what's the point? What do I do with that? If there's no self and everything is connected in some way (and especially if there's no free will), then there's no reason to be so judgmental of other people. Maybe be generous and feel love for all beings instead.

So am I Buddhist now? Sure, whatever. I guess I'm a secular Buddhist. But that's like saying I'm a small-increases-to-the-minimum-wage-don't-cause-large-increases-in-unemployment-ist. I looked at the statistics and it seemed reasonable. But it seems like more of a practice than anything else. So maybe it's like saying I'm an heirloom-beans-ist. Have you ever cooked a pot of heirloom beans, like from Rancho Gordo? With some bay leaves one of your best friends picked for you from the Berkeley hills, and salt, garlic, and an onion, slow, on the stovetop all day long? I've got a pot going right now, and it smells and tastes delicious. I don't eat it every day, but yeah, I'm an heirloom-beans-ist. I'm currently a member of the Rancho Gordo Bean of the Month Club, but I don't think they're the only beans out there, nor the only thing to eat for dinner. If you do A, B will happen, because of C. Well, I did A, and B happened, but that's not proof that C was the reason, nor that B would always happen if you did A.

What next? Running, meditating more, trying to get off the hedonic treadmill. Same as it ever was, perhaps with a skosh more equanimity.

The Path