Post #12: Seasons (Dhamma Blowback)

15 May 2023

The other day, when I was writing to friends about my new site, one of them got back to me saying that she was taking a break from reading any kind of Dhamma literature. This was a little unexpected, because only a few weeks earlier she seemed very much on fire after a ten-day course that we sat side-by-side, though not exactly together, on account of the strict separation of the sexes that is maintained quite rigorously at Goenka’s meditation centers. At the same time her sudden cooling to the practice did not come as a great surprise either, since such periods of Dhamma aversion are quite familiar to me too, and nothing very unusual on the circuit, especially on the heels of particularly intensive meditative episodes. (If this strikes you as psychologically implausible, consider how you would feel after having eating as much as physically possible of your favorite food in the world.)

Not so long ago, I went through such a period of retrenchment myself, when for a while I could barely look at the Buddhism and meditation section in a bookstore without recoiling from it, no question of going near the books or opening one, let alone reading in it. At other times, Goenka’s talks have gone in one ear and out the other without touching anything on their journey, and in the early days, they even unleashed moments of real exasperation, at his croaky style of so-called chanting, for example. Of course it could be that here, once again, a Dhamma laggard is revealing his sorry state of karmic backwardness; maybe so. But since such episodes afflict not only bush-league practitioners like me, but also certified star students when they are gunning for the “final goal” a little too enthusiastically, I am, as usual, not quite so sure of being altogether an outlier.

In the replies to the same batch of messages I sent out (individually, I hasten to add, with each written from scratch, in case you were wondering), I got a reply from someone I had met at a long course in India a decade ago, who had since graduated to the 45-day tier. She informed me that on account of having just sat through such a meditation marathon, she was going through things that words failed to describe, and that one day I too could hope to be initiated into such mysteries so that then we could talk about it. Well, well. How can she be so sure, I could not help wondering, that I have not gone through similar things myself, when she has told me practically nothing about it—assuming that she is not having a psychotic episode, which cannot be ruled out, or some harrowing meltdown in a less-than-happy marriage that she has been unable to extricate herself from, mat or no mat, for as long as I have known her.

Anyway, words can always be found if one makes an effort, that is what they are for: not to do full justice to the incommunicable uniqueness of our experience, which is impossible, but to convert it, approximately, into something that can be shared with others, lest we be left entirely alone with it. It is not that my friend’s forty-five days in the wilderness made her forget such basic truths, or that she was raised above them; she was never very good in the first place about communicating what is ailing her, and as a consequence, I suppose she will need to deal with it on her own, or with loftier pillars of support than I can provide. Up to you, as they like to say in Asia. And good luck to her.

What one should not expect is that particularly intense meditation exercises will simply eradicate one’s day-to-day difficulties and deficits, be they verbal or marital or otherwise practical. Even the Buddha was not magically transformed into an effective teacher by his breakthrough, sublime as it no doubt was; indeed his first efforts at conveying his discoveries miscarried to the point of being laughed off. “May it be so,” the first prospective student, a wanderer on the way to Varanasi, scoffed and shook his head in disbelief when the Buddha rattled off a series of spiritual distinctions that he had supposedly attained and that should, he was still naïve enough to believe, suffice for ensuring that he would be listed to (or so it is reported in the Majjhima Nikaya 26.25). Well, awakened being or not, he found himself being ignored and perhaps even mocked because he hadn’t yet learned to translate his experiences into appropriate terms.

At any rate, returning to retreats at the extreme end of the spectrum—where they can run not only 30 and 45 days, but 60 and 90 even—all kinds of complicated screws can get shaken loose. I am not qualified to pronounce either on the spiritual or the mental-health implications of Vipassana practiced as an extreme sport, but what is beyond doubt (and comprehensible even to practitioners at my lowly altitude who cannot be expected to understand the more subtle and sublime atmospherics of the practice) is that intensive retreats must not be expected to leave you walking on air afterwards. Like all serious operations, they may require a recovery period, and even then the truths they reveal and the raw spots they touch are not always such as to make your life any easier or more comfortable in the short-run. The worst clash I ever had with my mom, leading to six months of silence between us, came immediately after a 20-day service course, a truly formidable accomplishment for me, in its way. I had some rather explosive moments after my 30-day course, not only on Metta Day as I have already mentioned, but also after being discharged. And the nadir in my erstwhile marriage, then well on its way to dissolution but by no means there yet, came on the heel of six months in a row with a 10-day retreat in each. Certainly there was much else going on, and the retreats did not themselves provide the dynamite, though they were a definite source of tension with a domestically-minded wife; but even if dragging your powder out of the mud or the pouring rain and drying it out is the right thing to do, it does not make it any less explosive. If you are the powder-keg type, that is; if you are not, you may shrug here, but you are sure to have corresponding issues in some other area, I am afraid. Such is life in Samsara.

There are seasons in a meditation practice as there are in anything else: some conducive to single-minded seeking, some requiring a step back, so that one might one day leap forward more effectively again. (Or perhaps one could think of it on analogy with a dance-step that always combines two steps forward with one step back.) Sometimes one is in the mood for study, sometimes for the mat, sometimes for service, sometimes for none of the above. Some days, or hours, or minutes, you burst with energy, and then from one moment to the next, you can barely keep your head up or drag your limbs around, let alone keep up your efforts on the mat that only such a short while ago seemed so effortless and self-sustaining. So close and yet so far away already. Sigh.

A meditation retreat may reveal strange regularities, where some hours of the day turn out to be reliably keen and energetic, others as predictably sluggish. Even the years may fall into patterns. I don’t take my record-keeping to the lengths of analyzing spreadsheets and running regressions, but I noticed at some point that after an initial warm-up period, when I had first gotten started with the practice, I went through four distinct three-year cycles that I could tell unmistakably even by the simple count of the hours: the first very intense, the second a little more relaxed but still highly charged (resulting in another doubling of my retreat count at a time when I expected nothing of the sort), a third bringing further relaxation, followed, finally, by one in which I came as close as I ever got to losing interest, though I kept the fire burning throughout, albeit on a low flame, at times a mere flicker. And then all of a sudden, as if a clock had been reset, the practice sprang to life again in a fifth three-year period of recovery and reinvigoration.

The Pali scriptures speak of such cycles in Dhamma practice even at a global level, predicting that after 500 years of initial enthusiasm following the lifetime of the Buddha, there would be four equally lengthy eras of progressive decline before the Teaching would at last revive and spread again. Under the sway of those literalist impulses to which human beings seem to be beholden in all cultures and ages, purists have inclined to count off these epochs by the years on the calendar—calling a Sixth Buddhist Council in the mid-1950s in Burma, for example, to mark what was supposed to be the watershed moment at which the worldwide tide would turn and Buddhist practice would start its great expansion.

U Ba Khin seems to have been especially fond of this belief, and S.N. Goenka happened to get introduced to the Dhamma at just this time. Though it makes for a lovely story, however, “500” was not, for our remote Indo-European ancestors, a precise mathematical figure so much as shorthand for a very great number. The point was not that after 2500 cycles around the sun there would suddenly be a magical upsurge in interest—though it is striking that the Western fascination with the ways of the East began taking great strides in those days of the beatniks and their romance with Zen, for example. It was a time of ferment, no doubt about that; but the deeper message was not a matter of counting years, but of realizing that spiritual practices too have their seasons like everything else in life, some more congenial, others rather less so. As for the part played in such matters by the belief itself—hence the startling power of self-fulfilling prophecies—the Buddha was nothing if not a shrewd psychologist and would surely have acknowledged it without hesitation.

Reading: Majjhima Nikaya 26.19–27 (the Buddha’s early teaching troubles)