IT HAS BEEN DONE! Ten days (actually nine days, ten hours and I believe two minutes and thirty-two seconds, but who is counting) of complete silence. Every day this included ten hours, 45 minutes of meditation time, a little less than an hour and a half for consciously eating, an hour and 45 minutes of listening to theory or asking questions, six hours of sleep (not counting what you do while you are supposed to be meditating), three and a half hours of “break” where you have absolutely nothing to do but say to yourself, “Ok what am I going to do now? I guess I will sit down and think.” In this time there was to be no communication of any type, head down, no eye contact. Guys and girls were completely separated on different areas of the compound and only saw each others feet in the meditation hall and in the evening discourse. No reading, writing, listening to anything, exercising, independent eating (sorry stomach), and no practicing other meditations or rituals (all snake handling and fire breathing were out). So all and all, quite a bit of time to get to get acquainted with the inside of my head. And you know what I found? My head is one crazy, messed up place!
Yes indeed, I would probably go see a professional, but I think I might cause him/her serious mental damage if I tried to explain even half of some of the things that popped into my head over the past 10 days. It is really too bad we were not able to write anything down over this time because if people would buy books of a combination of Walt Disney, Quinton Terintino, and Sinbad, I could probably have spit out ten of them without breaking a sweat. But now that the 10 days are over I am having a hard time remembering past “Ommmm” (which we didn’t and were not even aloud to use but is in my head right now). Actually this is not the exact truth, as I did scratch down some thoughts somewhere in the middle of the week that I wanted to remember, but apparently because I didn’t have much time, paper, and the fact that it was illegal, I must have decided to make what I wrote as short and cryptic as possible and have no clue what the hell it means. Some stuff like “Ahhhhh THE PAIN!!!, and Please! MAKE THE VOICES STOP!!” I understand. But when I see things that may be written in Swahili, which I don’t think I speak or code phases like “London bridges falling on cricket man” I am at a lost. With this being said, I am still going to try and describe our time of contemplation.
I guess I can start with the theory. According to S. N. Goenka, an enlightened spiritual leader in India, and our teacher along the Nobel Path (unfortunately only via a series of CDs and Mp3s), our mind is a dangerous wild elephant and it is our charge that throughout our many lives we are to tame this wild beast for the benefit of society on our path towards enlightenment. While I will admit that I have not agreed with absolutely 100% of what our digital guru has said, I do believe this is true. However, I believe that the elephant, he is speaking of is a nice calm Indian elephant that has lived in nature most of its life and with the exception of the occasional child trampling or blowing water through its trunk on people, it is a generally good elephant. Mine on the other hand, was stolen away from its home in a small zoo at an early age and sold to the circus where it was highly trained in the skills of juggling, tightrope walking, fire breathing, clown throwing and who knows what else. It then has escaped while the Ringling Brothers were doing a one night show in Manhattan, in the parking lot of the world’s largest expedition of crystal Christmas tree ornaments and other breakable things, sponsored by the peanut factory’s brand new product, “Caffeinated Crack Coated Caramelized Peanut Bars”. I don't know about your literary competence, but the above description is there to show a little foreshadowing of our ten day stint.The elephant analogy was explained to us on the night of our first meditation. Each additional night more information was given to us concerning the techniques we learned that day, the story of Buddha, and the way of a disciple of Vipassana Meditation. On the third night it was explained to us that the previous day’s techniques had all been for the purpose of focusing our mental capacity. During these days 30+ hours of meditation had been spent concentrating on first our breathing, then the area of our breath around our nose, and finally narrowed down to one point of sensation around the entrance of the nostril of which I picked a single nose hair.
End of Part 1. Tune in later for Part 2. Nose Hair Contemplation
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