4 Days in the Jungle and 12 Years in a Wave

 

 

 

My dirty little very public secret about meditating for 7 days is that I only went for four. I went long enough to know that I didn’t want to leave because it was uncomfortable. I wanted to leave because monastic life just isn’t what I want and now I know it for sure. I got used to the schedule, the food, the sleeping, the showering, the jungle, the silence. I loved the silence. It’s not really silence, it’s just not talking; the jungle is never silent.

One quiet night we walked as a group in meditation around a statue of Buddha under the full moon, a frog had made its home in the water pooled between Buddha’s legs and its rhythmic croaking inevitably set our pace like a fife and drum. Ribbit, ribbit, croak, croak, toe, heel, toe, heal.

In the distance a man sang with full abandon into the sky. Maybe it was a chant, or a prayer, or maybe just a love song. Longing always sounds the same. We paused there for a minute to listen as his song stretched upward to reach us. It was a beautiful moment to have in the enforced silence of this ancient experiment, this ritual practice of curious exploration, this extraordinary awareness.

The singer was eventually overtaken by what I affectionately refer to as “murder crickets”. I’m not sure if they look, or act anything like crickets, but that’s what I call them because they’re insects that make noise in the wilderness. And boy do they make noise. They can reach an unbelievable volume, even beyond the unusual, mindful quiet cultivated by the retreat they are extraordinarily loud. The jungle is often loud. Sometimes it screams.

These crickets have likely been sampled for horror movies. They sing the most uncomfortable intervals, and they do it in chorus. The tonic starts, then in comes the 7, then the 11 rises in blood curdling tension. And they talk to groups all over the rainforest. So as one group starts singing their murderous tones, they are joined by another group 30 meters away, then another, and then another, signaling some impending horror. Of course it probably has something to do with mating and not murder, they are just bugs.

I had no recording devices at the retreat. I imagine they were working around the 100db range. Louder than a lawnmower, quieter than a jet engine.

The next time you’re watching a horror movie and the strings are swelling to bring the full weight of tension to the scene… imagine that penetrating sound overpowering you in the black jungle, only they are not strings, they are living things indifferent to your senses and suffering. You matter nothing to them at all. That’s how the whole jungle feels about you. 

The jungle is the ideal place to consider suffering because it’s just easier to do it here. It provides what you need to live but will also live happily on you. It absorbs you and it’s something you can feel.

Swimming and being in a dry bed are two opposite, but maybe equally enjoyable sensory experiences. Being fully dry or fully wet by choice is often lovely. But neither of those states are possible in Jungle, because the jungle is just damp. That’s just what the jungle is: it’s sort-of wet, all the time. And so, if you’re in the jungle, you’re just kind of wet all the time too; you join it. I got used to it, but I never liked it.

Meditating is all about realizing oneness. In contemplating the breath, we should eventually realize that we are the breath and the breath is us, and following it is an excellent way to bridge the gap between the infinity within us, and the infinity without us.

The jungle can, of course, do this too. Because, the jungle swallows you whole. It holds you in its dripping maw until your matter mingles with the ants and decaying coconut, with the browning leaves and the blossoming fruit trees. It crawls all over you and sucks your blood and drinks your piss and swallows your screams until you are it and it is you. The jungle is an excellent place to meditate on our infinite oneness. It is a magical place to feel small and large, ancient and advanced, conscious and capable, defenseless and besieged, all at once. It is the perfect place to disappear into the ever-pulsating mass of “the wheel”, turning its essential turn for eons. It is a place of endless death and becoming. It is also very damp.

I left early, but it was after I made my peace with the jungle. Truthfully, I had schemed to leave a little early anyway. I wanted to beat the rush of 60 or so young crunchies hitting the cheap hotel market on this small island at the exact same hour I was. This is very anti Buddhist. Buddhists are supposed to delight in their capacity to give to others. And generally I do, but I’m rather proud of the way this trip has made me generally more comfortable with taking up space in the world and so I felt quite good about selfishly thinking one step ahead of this little pool, in the name of getting what I actually need.

This notion was internal, as were all my anti-monk inclinations, and being unaware they (the locals and staff), really treat us like monks. I mean, we are, I guess, for this week we are. But they bow differently to us while we’re practicing. It’s a deep bow, head low kind of bow, a bow of great respect, similar, in fact, to the bow reserved for the King. It’s a little uncomfortable considering that I know I’m leaving this little experiment and not looking back. It’s not imposter syndrome… I’m actually an imposter.

I know I don’t deserve these bows of respect, but there’s nothing to be done about it. They are freely offered. And again I am in awe of the Thai culture and their capacity to see the best in people and to believe again and again in the goodness of those around them without being suckers. They’re not suckers. They are powerful, willful, capable people who are fully aware of the nightmarish capacity humans possess to be awful. They must see it so often in the company of young, dumb, rich, and often cruel tourists. Their attitude comes from Buddhist principles and I admire the way they live them. What they see in me right this minute is, in fact, a monk. They see someone giving everything to the path of enlightenment. Giving what they themselves are unwilling to give. For now, they see something worthy of great respect. Even though I don’t stay, it makes me want to live up to the idea. The only question is how?

Without reservation I can say Monastic life is not for me. I don’t agree with it and it doesn’t agree with me. And this feeling was more or less confirmed almost immediately upon leaving.

“I think therefore I am” is not something a Buddhist would say… they would say, “I think therefore I have thoughts.” A Buddhist
would be equally disinclined to suggest there was only one pathway off “the wheel”. Monasticism has its benefits, and I can see them, but that the possibility exists that this experience is all we’ll “know”, that this is the one shot we get at this little slice of consciousness, hiding oneself away in the jungle to sit and chant seems… disrespectful. And if dancing with the ocean means that you get swallowed by it, well at least you had a good dance. A very significant part of me feels, very strongly, that we are not here only to sit, but we are in fact here to dance.

And that’s what I did. I went to dance with the Ocean. I left the retreat, spoke my first words in days, hired a driver that cost more than my last 8 meals to take me just beyond a walking distance to land me at a beach. A beautiful, perfect beach. I asked for a beer, at 9:30 in the morning. I had been up since 3:30am or so, so mid-day for me. Check-in wasn’t until 2pm, so I went for a walk and got more beer and I drank it, then I went for a swim in the salty sea. No shower, no unpacking, just beer, my underwear, and bathtub warm waves. The water was deep and wild, and there is not much to do with water like that other than dance with it. And so I did.

I had trouble in the retreat actually meditating, which was difficult given it was around 6 solid hours of our day. I was having trouble sleeping and the persistent dampness perpetrated a dry cough left over in my lungs from Nepal. So in an environment where control of the body is prized I was actively disrupting everyone’s good zen with my constant barking and snot management. Imagine being on the doorstep of existential bliss and the guy next to you is struggling to swallow what must be a pint of clingy snot dripping slowly down the back of his throat. See? Even reading it sucks.

Additionally, a rule about not pointing your feet outward destroyed a fundamental part of my personal practice in meditation. I have extremely tight hips, confirmed by years of yoga practice and many different teachers, it’s genetic, I’ve worked on it, there’s only so much you can do. So when I meditate at home I usually start in a traditional sitting posture and then transfer to a wide leg posture that stretches my hamstrings and more importantly restores blood flow to my legs, only problems is: this makes my feet point outward and that isn’t allowed. Pointing your feet toward the Buddha is considered deeply disrespectful. I could turn to the side, but this felt even more awkward to me, like standing in an elevator facing the back wall.

So instead of sitting on the floor with the rest of the class, I resigned myself to the back of the hall using a full-on upright chair like the two senior citizens also partaking in the retreat. One of those seniors was so old he nearly died during a meditation. He collapsed and woke with his face on the floor, and we called an ambulance. I was the first by his side because I was the only other guy in a chair who wasn’t 1000 years old and my legs didn’t need any time to wake up. It was my plan all along; to be especially quick in case someone fell off their chair. Success. He was confused, but fine, likely dehydration. After he left for the hospital, only two of us senior citizens remained in chairs in the back. This was fine by me. Meditating in a chair is still meditating. But these little difficulties added up. I wasn’t really practicing, I was just conforming.

But the moment I hit the ocean; it felt like practice. I mean.. I haven’t been in the ocean since I was 8 or 9 and I didn’t remember how. It knocked me over so hard my it filled my underwear with sand and small rocks, several times. But I loved it, and I stayed until I learned how to be in the ocean. I learned how to be one with it. Breath in, breath out. I am it, and it is me. I am in the ocean now and now the ocean is in me. It reminded me of drumming in that it was teaching me something beyond the actual thing it was teaching me. It was meditative practice. I wasn’t tapping patterns, I was learning how to listen, how to calm, how to center and how to find my place in the place I was in. I was learning how to learn what was beyond what I was actually learning. Eventually I was just dancing.

In her most mild agitation, she lifts like an Olympian. But gracefully, she spins like Hepburn with all that rebellious elegance. She tossed me and caught me and welcomed me indifferently. And I just danced with her for hours. Pale pink skin sunburnt and peeling for days. She would kill me without a thought, she delighted me without effort. The crest and the undertow. Schrodinger’s wave: we are as much alive as we are already dead and when we are closest to one, we are probably closest to the other as well.

I learned more in five minutes in the ocean than I did in hours of meditation on the mountain; also, the ocean as far as I could tell, was unbothered by my snot. My cough starts to go away. I think more about living and dying and the suffering in-between.

I try not to forget that death is a predator, indifferently feeding, and sooner or later it chews and swallows. The “middle way” of the Buddha is as open to interpretation as anything else in the Dhammapada: “I am here to teach of suffering and the end of suffering.” And beyond that focus, Buddha was notoriously unwilling to engage in dialectal debate. Instead, we have a guide book to understand suffering and to alleviate suffering. The rest is up to the user. It’s a map, but it’s really a sketch and it comes with a set of crayons. It says “this works… eventually, but you have to see it for yourself and there is mystery in the seeing”. In the monastery, the path circles tightly inward, asking almost nothing of distance, only patience, curiosity, time. Patience and curiosity are paths without patterns for me. I find I follow them better than I lead. So, some find it in service, some in wandering, and some in caves. Some get little glimpses in waves.

There’s nothing like denial to remind us of abundance. And so, I’m thankful for the time to be curious in the monastery. It only took four days of austere vegetarian meals, fasting, sleep on a hard mat and the silence of damp, conscious practice to remind me of how joyful life is. How many avenues of joy there in fact are.

It is no small shock to the spirit to emerge from the monastery to the beaches of Samui. Lamai beach where I was, is not even the most extreme, Chaweng holds that title, but still, you are immediately bombarded with vehicles of pleasure, and despite their abundant consumption (or likely because of their abundant consumption) misery is everywhere. The beach is sex and drugs and alcohol, blood sport and vanity and indulgence. Anything desired can be bought and consumed here. I am equally thankful for how naked the effect of that consumption seems after the jungle. It is so clearly not a path to joy and the evidence is everywhere. I didn’t drink again after that first morning, and it was easy to let go. The middle path for me at least, necessarily involves abstinence. Because abstaining is simply more likely to be a vehicle of joy.

And I think that’s my greatest beef with monasticism. It’s a somewhat joyless vegetarianism.

As an abrupt mid-page foot-note: (That’s not actually true, monetary food walks the middle path solidly. Let me tell you that sprouted mung beans slathered in chili spiced vinegar and soy sauce after an 18hr fast is damned divine.)

The emphasis on control in a monastic setting necessarily denies the expression of joy. “This food is to nourish my body and nothing else,” sentiments like this abound in the twice daily food reflection. Joy is a judgment (positive, negative or neutral) on a sensation that is merely the mind asserting the ego and attempting to supersede the true reality of non-dual existence… of oneness. And I actually understand what that last sentence means now; and also believe it to be true. I really do. Maybe it’s the decades long depressive in me, but something feels absolutely wrong about not acknowledging joy as a gift when it comes. If mung beans bring me joy I want to let them. And that’s just where I am on this part of the path. And so a little story about how my sense of joy was incompatible with monastic life:

The monastery was built on what the locals charitably called a hill but felt like the shear slope and elevation of Kilimanjaro to me. Climbing the hill required an embarrassing number of stops the first day wherein I pretended to be stopping to admire the beauty; but there’s only so much that a beautiful view can change every five vertical feet and I’m sure no one bought it. The men’s dormitory and the main meditation hall were at the top of the hill, while the mess hall was at the bottom of the hill. So one day as we were all descending in the quiet, careful, toe-to-heel fashion of monks I noticed a girl weaving her path on the slope like a skier. It increased the number of steps she took and reduced the pitch of the path.

Apparently female monks all over the planet take to the process and lifestyle of monasticism more quickly and effortlessly than male monks do, but they’re also more likely to develop innovations; and innovations in religious practice often mean that they are sidelined from the standard bearer institutions and thus hinder their ability to be relevant in the larger political and social structure of the faith practices they represent. (It’s really worth your while to look into the role women played in the development of Tantric Meditation practices in Tibet for more context on this phenomenon and how it relates to the generally more innovative, but less-powerful role of women in religious institutions around the world. Similarly, the film Cabrini highlights this phenomenon in the Catholic church and it was shot, in part, in Buffalo.)  Here I was watching the phenomena play-out right before my eyes. I instantly loved the idea and started to weave myself. It took the pressure of descent off my knees and made the walk a bit more dance like. She eventually noticed that I was copying her and I let out a little skip of joy at this walking revelation to which she smiled and skipped herself; a silent but in its own way loud exclamation of joy in a very serious group. We were noticed by one of the nuns leading the group and met with admonishing brows of disapproval. She stopped. I stopped. We resumed a slow and straightforward descent. Although, I noticed that we both continued to weave more solemnly in the coming days, either in quiet protest or just as a kindness to our knees. I had a bit more fun with it when no one was around; I like to think she did too.

I learned later that this is a laughably common tactic for steep dissent and not at all innovative, but in the context of this little retreat, it was.  

I was not the only one who left early and when I brought my bags down to the base of the hill, one of the lead monks asked me to hide them because, as he put it: “Leaving is sometimes contagious.” Although this method of practice wound up not being for me, I do mostly understand the mild authoritarianism. I absolutely believe that it can lead (likely much more efficiently) to a satisfying and meaningful “practice of a lifetime” and that keeping relative control over the many individualistic instincts of the group is necessary to success in this context. We’re here, in part to abandon the ego, and to come closer to a sense of oneness, that goal must be necessarily harder to achieve with even minor rebelliousness. You can leave this place any time you want, take it or leave it, this is what we’re doing here. And that’s fair, I think.

I’ve never been not minorly rebellious, ever. It’s baked into my DNA. My staying would really only fuck things up for other people and leaving was the right choice. 

One of my minor rebellions was reading. It wound up being the most significant experience of my stay at the retreat and I’m very glad I stuck to it; but there is no question they would have much rather I didn’t read at all. It was very much frowned upon, and it was oddly disruptive.

I left the book out once and another monk happened upon it as though some mystical significance drew him to it. And no, of course not, silly. Mystical significance drew me to it, and only me, not you… I just left it out because I’m Fonzie cool and careless in the face of divine intervention. This was basically the discussion we had in silent mime. Thankfully he relented and gave me back the book that I had essentially stolen from the retreat library violating one of the 4 most basic tenants of Buddhism, not taking that which is not directly offered to you. And in all that awkwardness I got to read one of the most important books of my entire life: Reflections on a Mountain Lake by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, an early university print, signed by the author herself. But more on that later.

I really loved not having to socialize with anyone. A vow of silence in a large group of people leads to some awkward situations where you are unable to explain your actions and have to deal with the discomfort of not having any language. But, not having to talk to people and to be free to just exist quietly in the world is an absolutely beautiful experience. I’m reminded of stickers that are popular at some gatherings for autistic people eg: green means I’m down to socialize, yellow maybe, and red means I’d prefer to be left alone. Please, adult autistic community, please help us make this a common practice in all social situations all over the world. This is a wise and worth practice. Please lead the way, gift this brilliant and useful strategy to all of us.

I remember once approaching a tray of vegetable curry in the mess hall line. The buffet style lunch was set on a line of tables that could be accessed from both sides, so each tray of food had two serving spoons, one for each side. There were several trays of the same curry laid out, the first of which was nearly empty. I approached the tray at the same time as another monk and we needed to figure out how to deal with there being only enough for one more bowl in the tray. Being unquestionably a man of action and generally concerned with keeping lines moving, I removed one of the spoons from the tray, lifted it to pool the meager remaining contents in a corner and dumped the food into my bowl. I set down the empty tray, replaced the serving spoons and looked up to see the monk across from me utterly shocked at my selfishness. I really didn’t understand. Less than a foot from us was another, nearly full tray of the same curry, better in fact because it had more protein and vegetables. What I got was basically the juice at the bottom, delicious, but mostly spice and coconut milk.

Either he did not know they were the same or it didn’t matter. Should I have scooped the curry into his bowl in the “serve-others-first” tradition? Why should I presume that’s what he would want? I was just trying to keep the line moving for everyone. It didn’t help that the actual portion that wound up in my bowl was a little larger than the average, or that I’m fat. I was so embarrassed I left the line and skipped the rest of the food. Not being able to exchange even a few words over this very simple problem of misunderstanding left me only time to think about it; to consider a more mindful approach to the problem. Eventually I found myself considering a more mindful approach to problems in general. Without the capacity to reach understanding and thus dismiss the issue as resolved, I had to instead contemplate how to allow that which is unresolved the freedom to simply exist. I had to let go.

This is a very Buddhist concept because of the notion of karmic justice extending over many lifetimes. It’s honestly one of the hardest things for me to reconcile with Buddhism: the de facto irrelevance of justice here and now. Karma may play out within one’s lifetime, but it may not play out for many lifetimes, thus explaining how terrible people seem so often to prosper unjustly. My eat-the-rich sensibilities can’t reconcile this belief system against the grand injustice of an economic system that makes kings of psychopaths and wages wars of water torture against the earnest everyday people of the lower classes. I want justice and I want it now. Hell, if someone cuts in a line I want to see justice now, I’m not content to know they might stub their toe in some future life. Give me the pleasure of seeing them removed by security and sent to the back while people applaud. I love that shit. I like my justice tangible and as immediate as possible. Karmic justice feels hollow, incomplete, and insufficient.

A Buddhist might laugh at the notion of insufficient karmic justice, they might say something like, “Why worry about Trump? He is attached to the wheel, he will return a rat surviving on the feces of dogs.” But this belief system just requires too much belief for me. I’d like to see him hung by his balls today, also rats love poop and context matters. Grab that Orange Fuck by his pussy and string him up by it now, publicly. These sensibilities toward hyperbolic imaginary violence are among just a few of the things that make the life of a monk unachievable for me. Oh well, I got this far without religion; and meditation is still free. I’ll probably just try out the death-bed repentance scam the Catholics are running when the time feels right.

I wonder what justice I will face in the next life for taking all the curry. Did I already pay that debt with my embarrassment? Did I pay it with my earnest desire to move the line? Will I ever let go of my desire for justice to exist in my lifetime? Is it wrong to want it?

All of these questions are really moot anyway. Even if I were to find peace with allowing that which is unresolved to simply exist, and truly give up my desire for earthly justice it wouldn’t matter. I’m typing this from a beach in Samui populated with the young and beautiful and I’m sure that no matter what progress I make in my tolerance of the intolerable I will still, now, always, and forever love boobs enough to disqualify myself from enlightenment. I should probably just accept that fact. Buddhism’s solution for this particular desire is to meditate on the flesh below the flesh. The fat, bone, tracheal and colonic peristalsis, the pumping blood, the filtered waste. I’m just not there yet Buddha. Boobs are great and I like them just the way they are.

Gender segregation gets stranger and stranger with each passing year. ½ of our first trip around the retreat grounds was, “this space is reserved for women, and this space for men, and this space for Thai men, and this space for Thai women. And I get it… Thai people practice in Thai, the rest of the monastery practices in English. They’ve gotten letters and requests asking for women’s only spaces, places where women can feel safe in that necessarily naked abandon of meditation and men are just… a threat. I get it, just one paragraph ago I dismissed salvation for the love of boobs… we (straight men) are somewhere between reverent and a threat that way. But man it just feels a little crazy to spend so much energy segregating people collected in the pursuit of oneness.

The book I borrowed and continued problematically reading was written by a woman who spent 12 years meditating in a cave in the valleys between the India and Tibet. Her insights and perspective were so matter-of-fact and open, (open in the sense that 12 years in a cave was something valuable for her, but not necessarily for anyone else on a Buddhist path) I felt like the book was written directly for me. Her openness was radically inclusive. Imagine a Christian telling you time in church praying was only one pathway to God. I can’t. Imagine spending 12 years in a cave and NOT thinking that was the only way to touch God! She presented practice in terms of practical accessibility. It’s hard to express how a writer/thinker/teacher can be so uncommonly humble and specifically profound simultaneously. Every page had insights meaningful to me, all without demand, or self-righteousness, without even the benefit of conviction; just observation, personal revelation, born of child-like curiosity and a lifetime of practice.

Early on in the retreat they asked us, “why are you here? You tube can teach you how to meditate in your house, you can do everything we do here at home, why are you here?” Someone answered, “to be encouraged by people,” and that answer was accepted as correct. But I fell silently back on my constant understanding of human interaction, that, “we are mirrors unto each other, and we come to understand ourselves in part by the attempt to understand each other.” Now I know this retreat was silent and I honestly loved not having to interact with anyone, but having specific times to share with each other, to discuss the revelations, progress and challenges of our collective experience in coming closer to whatever it is we were coming closer to, seems to me to be essential and beneficial.

I spoke of my tight hips and typical meditating posture being impossible at this retreat, but additionally, one of the many bomb crater sized holes in Nepal’s roads left the sciatic nerve on my right side absolutely screaming in certain positions. It was getting better, but painfully slowly.

As my sciatic back twitched, and snot sucked my mind from a more contemplative practice, I would have loved to hear that someone else’s sore ankles made sitting difficult and distracted them, but also served as an object of meditation. How did the sensation of pain inform your practice? How did the sensation of pain, and your response to that sensation inform your practice? I wanted some time to understand the people around me because I believe that helps me understand myself. And I know this is true because my decision to leave was influenced in part by another practitioner’s unwillingness to participate in chants that made enemies of music and dance. He just sat there shaking his head emphatically, “No no no.” and closed his book unwilling to participate in such a sham. I was right there with him. I could not chant such things, and I have good reasons not to. Music has brought me to God more often than meditation by a mile. Music, dance and performance are among my earliest and most profound experiences of something greater than myself and are directly responsible for my own desire to explore whatever the beyond in fact, is. 

The monks leading the retreat talk at length of happiness, states of bliss or even just something approaching contentment, but spend most of their time experiencing something admittedly faint within themselves, occasionally profound, but mostly a whisper, and in pursuing it seriously, they largely abandon the world outside.

Indeed, the practicing monks do seem content. One monk sounded like Werener Herzog’s grandpa and his hilarious German monotone couldn’t help but project total contentment, even if no one could hear or understand what he was saying, it was nice to hear him speak. Even the harsh better-than-everyone edges of Pierre, the French monk, were softened slightly into a sort of mild pious condescension. When I handed him a note that said I wanted to leave early he said, “Ok, no problem, you understand what to do? Good. Come back any time. Best of luck to you.” and he meant it. Simple as that. This place was for a particular type of practice and no one was going to force you to be here. As strange as I found this place… it’s allowed to be strange. As am I.

The experience of Buddhist practice has made me more open. More open to living, more open to loving, more open to generosity, more open to finding the way that I fit in this world and just pursuing it. I can’t begin to express how thankful I am for that. In the era of MAGA and performative Christian Nationalism in the US I have repeated the phrase “There is no hate like Christian Love,” many times. Well, let me say from experience, “There is no acceptance like Buddhist acceptance. There is no love like Buddhist love. There is no non-judgment like Buddhist non-judgment. There is no peace like Buddhist peace. And the fact that “Buddhist” means so many things is at the heart of why I love this “religion” so much.

Again, inching my way toward a return home, I am reminded how austerity can make abundance all the sweeter. Living in Buffalo provides this experience to some degree every winter, but this brief time in the jungle was a master class.

Later, at Lamai, in the perfect beachside-beauty of a young tiktok influencer’s dreams a local masseuse trying to pitch a foot rub made conversation with me, struggling to hide her pity, “I see you out there every day, swimming all alone.”

I said, “I know, I feel so lucky.”