This year’s birthday wasn’t the greatest
piece of work I’ve ever experienced. Woke up with a sore throat
that presaged the cold I’d deal with for the following weeks. Made
the usual pilgrimage to Foxwoods
(where I lost for the first time in three years) and visit to Purgatory
Chasm, which was cold and grey but pleasant enough, then a big
grocery run, since I had free time and a rental car. Got myself Thai
takeout from Montien, which
was nice, but it outta be, at $21 for an app and one entree. Then
watched some anime on Hulu.
Woo-hoo.
The following morning I was in full-on head cold, and off at 8am for
the first day of my annual “Sandwich Retreat” at CIMC. The
“sandwich” means 12-hour meditation sessions on both
Saturday and Sunday of two consecutive weekends, with 3-hour evening
sessions on the five weekdays “sandwiched” in-between.
Sudafed FTW, baby. That’s
the only way I got through those nine days of head cold
hell. I was a coughing, drooling, snotting, sneezing, gagging,
nose-blowing, mouth-breathing ball of unhappy. Highly recommended way to
spend a long meditation retreat.
In the middle of the week I somehow managed to convince myself that
it’d be a good idea if I biked 20 miles out to
the Pan-Mass Challenge office to pick
up the sneakers that were this year’s premium for people who
reached the $6,300 Heavy Hitter fundraising level. The next day
(Thursday) I had such a massive relapse of sinus
pressure and headache that I skipped that evening’s retreat
session, which was actually okay, since there were no group discussions
that night, only sittings.
This was my fourth Sandwich Retreat, but it was the first time I
stayed at CIMC the whole
time. In previous years, I spent periods of walking meditation roaming
the streets near the center, whereas this year I stayed indoors and
stuck with the formal walking practice. I also spent this year’s
90-minute lunch breaks napping in CIMC’s lower meditation
hall, rather than going out and sitting on the steps of Cambridge City
Hall.
In fact, the only time I went outside I just sat on a bench in the
yard, captivated by the bizarre moire
patterns made by passing cars’ hubcaps, viewed through the
gaps in CIMC’s slatted
wooden fence.
And unlike prior years, when I’d pick up food from outside,
this year I actually stayed and ate the vegetarian meals CIMC provided. Depressingly, all
four lunches were some form of vegetarian stew, but they were paired
with brown rice and bread, which I was able to fill up on. And please,
people: raw green beans aren’t tasty or elegant; for chrissake
cook those suckers!
The biggest challenge I had was with my “yogi
job”. This year I was again assigned to end of day
cleanup. It’s a two-person job, and my good buddy Mark signed up
to be my parter. Except on the first day, he didn’t show up for
it. And the second day, he left early. Then he didn’t even show up
for the second Saturday and Sunday. I was kind of stunned that
he’d stiff me like that, but some of it was misunderstandings that
were later clarified, and thankfully other yogis stepped up and helped
me out.
One of the things that makes the Sandwich Retreat unique is the
“homework” we are given: something to
practice with throughout our regular weekdays, which we can then share
with others during the evening sessions. This year we were asked to
notice when we were feeling resistance to life as it
is, note what conditions caused it, what emotions and mind states it
manifested as, and how it evolved and changed once we noticed it.
What almost no one (including me) realized was that this was
the exact same homework as last year’s
Sandwich Retreat! Ironically, I think a lot of what I observed
during the week this year was nearly the same as things I’d
observed last year!
Being unemployed and living alone, I wasn’t interacting with a
lot of other people, which limited the number of opportunities I had for
resistance to come up. The ones I did notice were subtle and ephemeral,
like the briefest irritation when I had to wait for a line of cars to
pass before I could walk across the street. Such irritations arose and
disappeared so fast that I couldn’t really examine them. In the
end, I decided that the source of my irritation was some kind of unmet
expectation, followed by an immediate reset of my expectations.
“Oh! There’s a line of cars. I guess I have to wait.”
As soon as I adjusted my expectations, the resistance
passed and I was much more patient with the situations.
Naturally, my cold provided me with an opportunity to
practice with resistance. On Monday, when I described how
acknowledging my irritation lessened its power over me, Larry commented
that stopping those problematic mental proliferations actually leaves
more energy for the body to fight off infection (or other maladies).
Sadly, that didn’t help me during Thursday’s relapse, when
mindfulness of my irritation did absolutely nothing to alleviate my
physical symptoms and the misery that came with them.
During our sitting meditation periods, I spent most of my time doing
karuna
practice: the compassion work that I began last month and plan
to continue for a full year, similar to the metta practice I
did last year. I feel like it is both more meaningful to me and a
more productive practice than metta, so I’m really enjoying it so
far.
As if exploring resistance and developing compassion weren’t
enough to work with, I spent my two teacher interviews grilling Narayan
and Michael about my felt sense of anatta (non-self), free
will, and the nature of the observer.
I think a lot of it revolves around whether the act of
observing life as it plays out is something undertaken by some
independent entity within, or whether it’s just another thought
process. Because that determines who is in control.
Basically, if everything (including my feelings, thoughts, and
actions) is purely conditioned, then I don’t see
myself as having the western idea of free will. And that, in turn,
causes the Buddhist concept of “non-self” to make more sense
to me. If there’s no free will, there’s no independent actor
making choices, and if there’s no independent actor making
choices, how can there be such a thing as free will?
That was my basic thought process, and I wanted to run it by our
guiding teachers to see if they thought it was (a) a useful line of
inquiry, and (b) a reasonable understanding of the Buddhist view of
reality. However, as is typical in these situations, their responses
left me with many more questions than answers.
I first talked with Narayan, who said it was a meaningful line of
inquiry, because it relates directly to Wise View:
the first and foundational element of the Noble Eightfold
Path. She also agreed that all thoughts and feelings are
conditioned, but disagreed with the idea that the observer is
just another thought.
She asserted that there is something within us that allows us to
influence our actions, to alter the conditions that are the input to our
decisionmaking process, but she described it in terms of a process, an
action, a “mystery”, and a way of “be-ing”. She
even described it as our innate “Buddha nature”, that seed
of the unconditioned within us all.
She also didn’t think that “free will” was
necessarily the best way of thinking about it, since there’s no
way of definitively knowing whether we have free will or whether
it’s just an illusion. Thus, the question of the degree to which
we are able to make free and conscious choices is similar to the
questions the Buddha described as “not
useful” in the Cula-Malunkya
Sutta.
Narayan acknowledged that there was a seeming
contradiction in the idea that all thought, feeling, and
actions are conditioned, while man still has the freedom to influence
his thought patterns, make decisions, and take independent action. After
the interview, I felt that contradiction was something I would have to
sit with and examine at length.
I also felt it might be useful to spend some time trying out the idea
that everything is conditioned and there is no such thing as free will,
just to see how it differs from our default and predominant world view
that we are independent actors.
After that, I really wanted to talk to Michael about it, since
Narayan seemed to have directly contradicted something I’d heard
from him, that the observer really was just another (conditioned)
thought process. So a week later, I talked to him.
Rather than answer my question directly, Michael came back with an
alternate question. For him, it isn’t the question that’s
important, but what is driving the question. Why does
the question need to be answered? Does it tell us something about the
person asking the question? As a parting shot, Michael suggested that
universal questions like this can tell us a lot about the
individual’s relationship with the unknown. It wasn’t what I
wanted to hear, but it was definitely more food for thought.
So when the time came for the final day’s feedback session, I
talked a little bit about the scattered nature of examining
three things at once: the karuna/compassion
practice I was doing during the sitting periods; the homework, which
concerned itself with resistance and aversion; and my teacher
interviews, where I grilled them about non-self, the nature of
awareness, and my relationship to it. I didn’t even mention our
homework from the Long-Term Yogi group, which has to deal with
interpersonal connection and Wise
Speech. Still, I felt like I made progress on all those
fronts.
Despite being sick, I wasn’t as mentally
fatigued this year as in previous years, when I was absolutely
exhausted. Part of that is attributable to being unemployed, but I also
made a conscious effort to be more relaxed in my practice during the
sittings, which I’m sure helped. The only day I felt truly wrung
out was the final day, which was okay with me.
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