Ирвин Ялом - The Schopenhauer Cure

question about insomnia to Manil.

«Not for you to be concerned about,” he replied, gazing off into the distance. «The

body takes whatever sleep it requires.»

«Well then,” Pam tried again, «could you tell me why shrill police whistles are

being blown outside my window all night long?»

«Forget such questions. Concentrate only uponanapana–sati. Just observe your

breath. When you have truly applied yourself, such trivial events will no longer be

disturbances.»

Pam was so bored by the breath meditation that she wondered whether she could

possibly last the ten days. Other than the sitting, the only available activity was listening

to Goenka`s nightly tedious discourses. Goenka, garbed in gleaming white, like all the

staff, strove for eloquence but often fell short because an underlying shrill

authoritarianism shone through. His lectures consisted of long repetitive tracts extolling

the many virtues of Vipassana, which, if practiced correctly, resulted in mental

purification, a path to enlightenment, a life of calmness and balance, an eradication of

psychosomatic diseases, an elimination of the three causes of all unhappiness: craving,

aversion, and ignorance. Regular Vipassana practice was like regular gardening of the

mind during which one plucked out impure weeds of thought. Not only that, Goenka

pointed out; Vipassana practice was portable, and provided a competitive edge in life:

while others whiled away the waiting time at bus stops, the practitioner could

industriously yank out a few weeds of cognitive impurity.

The handouts for the Vipassana course were heavy with rules which, on the

surface, seemed understandable and reasonable.But there were so many of them. No

stealing, no killing of any living creature, no lies, no sexual activity, no intoxicants, no

sensual entertainment, no writing, note taking, or pens or pencils, or reading, no music or

radios, no phones, no luxurious high bedding, no bodily decorations of any sort, no

immodest clothing, no eating after midday (except for first–time students who were

offered tea and fruit at 5P.M. ). Finally, the students were forbidden to question the

teacher`s guidance and instructions; they had to agree to observe the discipline and to

meditate exactly as told. Only with such an obedient attitude, Goenka said, could students

gain enlightenment.

Generally, Pam gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, a dedicated

man who had devoted his life to offering Vipassana instruction. Of course he was culture–bound. Who wasn`t? And hadn`t India always groaned under the weight of religious

ritual and rigid social stratification? Besides, Pam loved Goenka`s gorgeous voice. Every

night she was entranced by his deep sonorous chanting in ancient Pali of sacred Buddhist

tracts. She had been moved in similar fashion by early Christian devotional music,

especially Byzantine liturgical chants, by the cantors singing in synagogues, and once, in

rural Turkey, was transfixed by the hypnotic melodies of the muezzin calling the

populace to prayer five times a day.

Though Pam was a dedicated student, it was difficult for her simply to observe her

breathing for fifteen straight minutes without drifting off into one of her reveries about

John. But gradually changes occurred. The earlier disparate scenarios had coalesced into

a single scene: from some news source—either TV, radio, or newspaper—she learned

that John`s family had been killed in an airplane crash. Again and again she imagined the

scene. She was sick of it. But it kept on playing.

As her boredom and restlessness increased, she developed an intense interest in

small household projects. When she first registered at the office (and learned to her

surprise that there was no fee for the ten–day retreat), she noted small bags of detergent in

the ashram shop. On the third day she purchased a bag and thereafter spent considerable

time washing and rewashing her clothing, hanging them on the clothesline behind the

dormitory (the first clothesline she had seen since childhood), and, at hourly intervals,

checking on the drying process. Which bras and which panties were the best dryers? How

many hours of night drying were equal to an hour`s day drying. Or shade drying versus

sun drying? Or hand–wrung clothes versus non–wrung clothes?

On the fourth day came the great event: Goenka began the teaching of Vipassana.

The technique is simple and straightforward. Students are instructed to meditate on their

scalp until a sensation occurrs—an itch, a tingle, a burning, perhaps the feeling of a tiny

breeze upon the skin of the scalp. Once the sensation is identified, the student is simply to

observe, nothing more. Focus on the itch. What is it like? Where does it go? How long

does it last? When it disappears (as it always does), the meditator is to move to the next

segment of the body, the face, and survey for stimuli like a nostril tickle or an eyelid itch.

After these stimuli grow, ebb, and disappear, the student proceeds to the neck, the

shoulders, until every part of the body is observed right down to the soles of the feet and

then in reverse direction back up the body to the scalp.

Goenka`s evening discourses provided the rationale for the technique. The key

concept isanitya—impermanence. If one fully appreciates the impermanence of each

physical stimulus, it is but a short step to extrapolate the principle ofanitya to all of life`s

events and unpleasantries; everything will pass, and one will experience equanimity if

one can maintain the observer`s stance and simply watch the passing show.

After a couple of days of Vipassana, Pam found the process less onerous as she

gained skill and speed at focusing on her bodily sensations. On the seventh day, to her

amazement, the whole process slipped into automatic gear and she began «sweeping,”

just as Goenka had predicted. It was as if someone poured a jug of honey on her head

which slowly and deliciously spread down to the bottom of her feet. She could feel a

stirring, almost sexual hum, like the buzz of bumblebees enveloping her, as the honey

flowed down. The hours zipped by. Soon she discarded her chair and melded with the

three hundred other acolytes sitting in the lotus position at the feet of Goenka.

The next two days of sweeping were the same, and each passed quickly. On the

ninth night she lay awake—she slept as badly as before but was less concerned about it

now after learning from one of the other assistants (having given up on Manil), a

Burmese woman, that insomnia in the Vipassana workshop is extremely common;

apparently, the prolonged meditative states make sleep less necessary. The assistant also

cleared up the mystery of the police whistles. In southern India, night watchmen routinely

blow whistles as they circle the perimeter of the territory they guard. It is a preventative

measure warning off thieves in the same way the little red light on auto dashboards warns

car thieves of the presence of an activated auto alarm.

Often the presence of repetitive thoughts is most apparent when they vanish, and it

was with a start that Pam realized that she had not thought about John for two entire days.

John had vanished. The entire endless loop of fantasy had been replaced by the honeyed

buzz of sweeping. How odd to realize that she now carried around her own pleasure

maker which could be trained to secrete feel–good endorphins. Now she understood why

people got hooked, why they would go on a lengthy retreat, sometimes months,

sometimes years.

Yet now that she had finally cleansed her mind, why was she not elated? On the

contrary, a shadow fell upon her success. Something about her enjoyment of «sweeping»

darkened her thoughts. While pondering that conundrum, she dropped off into a light

twilight sleep and was aroused a short time later by a strange dream image: a star with

little legs, top hat and cane, tap–dancing across the stage of her mind. A dancing star! She

knew exactly what that dream image meant. Of all the literary aphorisms that she and

John shared and loved, one of her favorites was Nietzsche`s phrase fromZarathustra :

«One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.»

Of course. Now she understood the source of her ambivalence about Vipassana.

Goenka was true to his word. He delivered exactly what he had promised: equanimity,

tranquility, or, as he often put it,equipoise. But at what price? If Shakespeare had taken

up Vipassana, wouldLear orHamlet have been born? Would any of the masterpieces in

Western culture have been written? One of Chapman`s couplets drifted into mind:

No pen can anything eternal write that is not steeped in the humour of the night

Steeped in the humour of the night—thatwas the task of the great writer—to

immerse oneself in the humour of the night, to harness the power of darkness for artistic

creation. How else could the sublime dark authors—Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Virginia

Woolf, Hardy, Camus, Plath, Poe—have illuminated the tragedy lurking in the human

condition? Not by removing oneself from life, not by sitting back and observing the

passing show.

Even though Goenka proclaimed his teaching was nondenominational, his

Buddhism shone through. In his nightly discourse cum sales pitch, Goenka could not

restrain himself from stressing that Vipassana was the Buddha`s own method of

meditation, which he, Goenka, was now reintroducing to the world. She had no objection

to that. Though she knew little of Buddhism, she had read an elementary text on the plane

to India and had been impressed by the power and truth of the Buddha`s four noble

truths:

1. Life is suffering.

2. Suffering is caused by attachments (to objects, ideas,

individuals, to survival itself).

3. There is an antidote to suffering: the cessation of desire, of

attachment, of the self.

4. There is a specific pathway to a suffering–free existence: the

eight–step path to enlightenment.

Now, she reconsidered. As she looked about her, at the entranced acolytes,

the tranquilized assistants, the ascetics in their hillside caves content with a life

dedicated to Vipassana «sweeping,” she wondered whether the four truths were so

true after all. Had the Buddha gotten it right? Was the price of the remedy not

worse than the disease? At dawn the following morning she lapsed into even

greater doubt as she watched the small party of Jainist women walk to the

bathhouse. The Jainists took the decree of no killing to absurd degrees: they

hobbled down the path in a painfully slow, crablike fashion because they first had

to gently sweep the gravel before them lest they step on an insect—indeed they

could hardly breathe because of their gauze masks, which prevented the inhalation

of any miniscule animal life.

Everywhere she looked, there was renunciation, sacrifice, limitation, and

resignation. Whatever happened to life? To joy, expansion, passion, carpe diem?

Was life so anguished that it should be sacrificed for the sake of

equanimity? Perhaps the four noble truths were culture–bound. Perhaps they were

truths for 2,500 years ago in a land with overwhelming poverty, overcrowding,