No brass bands, no hosannas, no Certificates of Completion.
Just a bus ride from a town in Myanmar’s eastern frontier to the border,
followed by a sweaty walk into Thailand carrying a backpack, daypack, and
guitar. Unless something unexpected happens, Myanmar is history.
Let’s see, I flew into Yangon on February 25, 2013, spent
two months in Thailand, three in Vietnam, exit visa dated October 5, 2014, that
makes 14 months in Myanmar, enough to get a good feel for the place.
If I add up all the time I spent in meditation centers it
comes to nine months, which was unexpected when I left Seattle. Three months,
yes, not nine. And because I’m a Westerner accustomed to self-flagellation and
expectations of perfection, I feel like I should've made much greater progress.
Which is comical because that’s what the practice is all about—looking at those
kinds of thoughts, realizing how empty they are, and letting them dissolve
while the next thought moment arises and conditions the next.
With U Hoai, Vietnamese American sayadaw (abbot) of a meditation center in Myanmar.
Am I a better person? I believe so. Am I the same? Without a
doubt. I still get angry, depressed, and confused, but I am much less likely to
react to those mind states the same way as in the past. At least sometimes. I'm
more likely to view them as temporary--for you fellow Buddhists out there, as dukkha, anicca and anatta. For
everyone else, those Pali words roughly translate into “unsatisfactoriness,”
“impermanence” and “no-self.” Sometimes I immediately view them as impermanent
sad/mad/egad thoughts, other times I need a few minutes, but I'm not as likely
to go over the edge as consistently as I'm accustomed to.
(For you non-Buddhist buds out there, a great little book is
“What the Buddha Taught,” by Walpola Rahula. Only 90 pages, you can get a free pdf
copy here.
I’m not trying to convert anyone, I just needed the opportunity to share a poem
I wrote:
Walpola Rahula
Ain’t no one more coola
Walpola Rahula
Did well in his schoola
Walpola Rahula
He’s nobody’s foola
Walpola Rahula
Walpola Rahula)
Am I the same? Without a doubt.
Dad, why didn’t you tell me I was going to have all these
sexual fantasies in my 60s, without the goods to do anything about them? You
were probably too tired working and paying for three kids. Damn, I thought I’d
get rid of them eventually, but nooooo. The first week of this latest retreat I
did not need Viagra, magazines, or the Internet. I thought about changing my
name to Randy. It only lasted a week, but it set the tone.
I'll try to explain what for me was the high point of my
practice in Myanmar, maybe the high point of my entire time here.
In a nutshell, there are five concepts usually referred to
as "spiritual faculties": sati,
samadhi, viriya, saddha and panna. I'll let you look up four of them
if you're interested, the only one I'll define is samadhi, frequently translated as "concentration," but
some teachers prefer "stability (of mind)".
With practice, it is possible to use very little effort to
watch thoughts arise and dissolve without feeding them. The more experienced
you become, the more you can watch thoughts come and go 24/7. At my current
level I fall in and out of mindfulness, and need to constantly remind myself to
return when I fall out. It's just repetitive practice.
The first teacher I spent time with in Myanmar speaks about
achieving samadhi to the point that
it is difficult to not meditate--that
is, meditation becomes the default mode. Whenever I heard him say that, my
immediate reaction was, "That's for others, not me, I can't imagine myself
getting there."
I had a 4-5 day period of samadhi in the middle of my last retreat that surprised me. It
wasn't 24/7, not by a long shot, but whenever I sat down on a cushion I found
it easy to enter samadhi, and when I
did my walking meditation it did not completely disappear, as it tends to do.
Now, that still leaves many hours of the day without stability.
Breakfast and lunch were times of constant forgetting. When one of the
teenagers who work at the center played his pop music really loud on his radio,
those were times of forgetting. But when I caught myself I quickly fell back
into samadhi, which surprised me
again and again.
I consider that the high point of my 14 months in Myanmar.
Pretty exciting, eh? Woo-hoo!
It didn't last.
For the final two weeks of my retreat I returned to my usual
default mode. The first week after leaving the center I reacted to several
little things: I got snubbed for a volunteer teaching position I was interested
in. I tried changing my website domain registration from Network Solutions to
another company--anyone who has dealt with Network Solutions will understand my
frustration. For some reason my version of MSWord removed the "Spelling
and Grammar" check function (a very important tool for someone with an
online editing business) and replaced it with a generic and worthless
"Dictionary" function. The back-breaking straw was a story I read in
the NY Times about how the Governor of Louisiana blatantly pulled off a
legislative end-around to block a lawsuit to get oil companies to pay for the
damage they've inflicted on south Louisiana wetlands.
Rage. Not just annoyance, rage. The old outrage circuits
that have been conditioned and reconditioned for decades roared back, laughing
and saying, "We've been waiting for you to end this retreat
nonsense." I know that it is
possible to have all of these experiences with a sense of equanimity, I'm
thoroughly convinced of that. They're minor, they're empty. But not me, not now,
not without more practice.
Am I the same? Without a doubt.
Walpola Rahula
He’s nobody’s foola
Why can't I be coola
Like Walpola Rahula?
Greetings from a hotel room in the town of Mae Hong Son in
northern Thailand, where I'm nursing a sore throat and bronchial infection
(caught while riding a motorcycle over surprisingly cool and damp mountain
passes) and scouring the Web for a volunteer teaching position in an Ebola-free
African country. I'll bet there's one with my name on it.
My Born to Be Wild side, in Vietnam.
