Into Indo and the insides of my mind

Jolly Raka

Having arrived in Bali and ventured to its spiritual centre in Ubud, I spent a few blissfully relaxing  days in a beautiful little traditional  homestay with a gregarious and warm old, little Balinese man named Raka and his family. Sunrise strolls through lush green rice paddies with a backdrop of magnificently lustrous heaping tropical cumulus framed the decadent days, and I ate luxurious four course feasts of local dishes in solitary candle light by night. The prefect prelude to my first Vipassana which was set to begin on April 23rd ......

At the airport I was quickly cornered by another ataraxia aspirant, Peter. An airy fairy character of spacey countenance, Peter attempted to educate me awkwardly on a barrage of astrological and astronomical misinformation providing an stereotypical spiritual splurge to the entrance to my first hench medatitive experience. I found myself glazing over and staring vacantly out the window,  quietly reproaching myself for the conspicuous tan marks on several of my fingers from my long endentured ring wearing having removed them the day before for the onset of austerity. Not exactly the look of inherrent unadornement I would have preferred to have exume whilst undergoing 2,500 year old teaching on non-attachment passed down from the time fo the Buddha. On the two hour journey from the airport to the centre I suffered a slight headache. Prescient turmoil at the 10 days of potential suffering I was possibly about to endure, or resultant health implications the stack of sweet breads and muffins I'd eaten in anticipation of the scarily small sattvic diet I was soon to encounter. Who knows. But the niggling pain did, nonetheless, help me drown out Peter.

Guess who's who...

We'd picked up four other meditation students at the bus stop, and the six of us wound our way through the Javan countryside climbing high into the surrounding hills. Our space cadet astrobiologist fronted the taxi, the proximity having little effect on his bizarre and domineering musings, and an eccentric French woman with a floppy hat sat in the middle, besides a beautiful and calm French girl named Juliette who was sat seperating Peter from the slightly belligerent and short fused Brazillian to her right. I was compacted neatly in the very back besides the luggage, and was pleased to get out as we arrived at the rather uninteresting looking centre just south of Bogor. Signing in and relinquishing all our earthly possessions we chatted nervously, as the first of many electrical storms raged clamorously overhead, and waited for the bell to toll 8o'clock signifying the start of our imminent metanoia. Ten days without speech began. As the sun set that evening, it shattered the sky into a truly breathtaking spectrum of colour over the glorious layers of cirrus and altocumulus, dramatically marking the beginning of a beautiful, solitary journey.

Home for next 120 hours...

Days one, two and three dissolved away like the dissapating clouds. Bizarrely, I was excited to wake up at 4am and confront two hours of twilight meditation before breakfast at 6:30am. And although these soporific sessions weren't always my most progressive, a serene sense of calm came to me quickly as I began to settle into the technique. Regarding the method, so specific as it is, I don't think I could be more wrong in describing its facets here, as the unveiling of its content rolls on in perfect unison with the day by day structure of the course. However, overall it is an endeavour I would readily and enthusiastically recommend to anyone and everyone, friends and foes and family and beyond. To have known of its convention and developments before my own experience would have been a definitely robbed me of the reverence and revelation that comes naturally with its features. It was not as I expected, or could have expected, but I quickly developed a voracious appetite for its practice and a steady sense of serenity during the twelve hours of diurnal meditation sessions.

The fourth day was more difficult, with the novelty and intrigue wearing out and the pain and cramping of sitting cross legged for such long periods of time setting bitterly in. My knees were burning and my spine was beleagured by relentless shooting pains, leaving me weepy eyed during the first of three hour long daily sessions of discouraged movement that had just been introduced. All other meditators were shrouded in an ambience of ambiguity as we were drawn deeper into the noble silence from the evening of our arrival, and we conducted ourselves throughout the ten days in solitary confinement avoiding even an exchange of gaze which may disrupt our ongoing internal investigations. This however, excluded the exclamations of frequent and clamorous bowel movements from a flatulent Balinese woman who seemed unable to prevent a barrage of burps from spilling out disgustingly during our time in the communal hall. The accoustics so positioned to magnify their sound. Still, a good practice of neutrality and non-attachment I guess.

Day 5, despite being my lucky number took a dip in success and it was on the 6th that I gave myself the necessary gift of an accidental snooze at 5am being physically unable to keep my tired mind on the morning task of meditating. The food was uttterly fantastic, collected in breakfast and lunch portions before we fasted from midday. Toast with jams and even chocolate spread, fruit, tir frys, modest curries and rice were offered plentifully twice a day, all vegetarian of course. During break sessions which thankfully fractured the 12 hours of meditation I retreated to a small, tiled vestibule facing a distance of sweeping hills where I meticulously investigated a wealth of Indonesia's most interesting insects from magnificent moths, stag beetles and stick insects. I'd trace the busy lines of giant ants whilst conducting an hour of stretching after breakfast, and observe an ongoing myriad of spiny visitors whilst I waited for the evening discourse from the founder of new age Vipassana, a practice resurrected by a formideable yet fairly normal Indian man names Goenka, 50 years ago. Unfortaunately passing in September 2013, practicing under his guidance was now impossible, but the video supplements were a constant revelation and taught me more than I had expected to learn.

As the sun began to dip over the edges of the surrounding hills, our nightly vigil was accompanied by the relentless hum of a symphony of circada, the singing of birds and the flap of awakening bats. OVerhead, equatorial clouds billowed into deafening activity with nightly displays of spectacular lightening storms bringing cracks of thunder seemingly into the roof directly above our heads. One such tumultuous clap stirred me to deep and immediate terror, with a look on my face that must've been so inescapably funny that the girl sat on the far side of the room who had caught my look laughed aloud, challenging the noble silence. However, admittedly, some encroachments by hideously large coackroachs had left me and an American darting for cover and briefly exchanging a plan for ridding it within the confinements of our room.

Silent no more

As the final days drew to a close, each of the ten passing remarkably quickly despite the 120 of meditation and little else contained in them, I began feeling incredibly positive. Having read of turbulent emotional upheavals accompanied by physical illness stirred by the intensity of the meditation, I was pleased to have experienced a quite and constant succession of successes. A simple contemplative association with many thoughts, ideas and issues and a deepening of understanding left me feeling remarkably stable and aware of my unique state of mind. Completion of the course itself was a huge achievement, as well as the incredible progression of my previous uneducated and unrefined meditation practice. When the volunteer staff finally announced the end of our effors, it took a few moments before a tidal wave of discussion crashed upon us. We stayed up until 2:30am, despite being vaguely mortified we would still have to wake up at 4am for a final group meditation. Even the numinous network of other meditatiors so close which had previously empowered us for hours on end lacked some of its initial impact as we were now in communication and exchanging excited and congratulatory glances. The noble silence was truly an apt and powerful convention of the course, and I am so happy to have completed it. 

The clouds clear on our final day