Ornoth

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.