Post #168: Doctor’s Orders

10 Jan. 2025

     The Buddha of the Pali Canon described himself as the doctor of mankind—a kind of universal practitioner—and from the strict Vipassana meditator’s point of view, one’s daily sittings are meant to be administered almost like medicine for a chronic ailment: one hour in the morning, one hour at night, and one retreat a year for deeper rehabilitation. Experiments with the dosage are, as with our good doctors at the hospital, not encouraged; there are reasons why the prescription runs as it does, even if patients may be inclined to second-guessing.

     For the first year after I completed my initial Vipassana course (a mandatory ten days for newcomers, no short-cuts permitted), I felt that I had stumbled upon something potentially life-changing, and afterwards I kept doing a few sittings here and there, as best I could; but I was not fully won over yet, hence unable to go further. A year after the introduction, I did another retreat in the same format and came away more convinced; then a third, six months later. A big move (to Singapore) scattered my practice again, but by the end of my second Vipassana year, I was ready to put down my chips and commit.

     If this practice was what it purported to be, I reasoned with myself, then it was worth throwing one’s weight behind it; and if not, it was time to find out. So I started doing my sitting diligently, at least two full hours a day, as the rulebook prescribed. I also began reading up on the practice more systematically and worked myself into what I have described as the gung-ho state of mind that is quite common among recent arrivals on the Path. After six months of unrelenting effort, a friendly argument with a buddy persuaded me that perhaps being too rigid was also not advisable, so I dropped my requirement that sittings always be done in one piece, complete hours only, and I relaxed the regimen such that as long as I got to 120 minutes in a day, whatever the composition, I would consider it good enough. (In this common-sense calculation I may have overlooked something vital, namely that there may be deeper dimensions to a sitting that get activated only in the second half of an hour—thus parts you might never get to if you sit only thirty minutes at a time, however often in a day.)

     This intensive stage lasted for almost three years, during which I sat and served a dozen Vipassana courses more, including two that ran for twenty and thirty days respectively, for a grand total of fifteen. That all done, the old question reared its head again with renewed force: since the practice was so very open-ended, and not getting significantly easier with time, did it really make sense to proceed quite so doggedly? How long could I hope to maintain the practice in such a strict spirit? Should it not perhaps be done in a more easy-going mood—worn a little more lightly, as it were, than I could manage if I was to keep up my two daily hours, come what may? Maintaining the practice at prescription strength, yet in a relaxed manner at the same time—the beau ideal of the Middle Way no doubt—was not an option for me; even if the sittings did not usually require outright force to get through without fail, they certainly took considerable pressure.

     So I began to question whether the trajectory I was on, well-intentioned though it was, really made sense for the long run. Eventually I came to the conclusion, both with misgivings and with relief, to let off meditative steam and proceed more casually. The consequence, over the next three years, was that I still maintained a daily practice, but with the hours varying widely. Sometimes I would get to the mandated two, more often not; other days I might do as little as half an hour. The average held up surprisingly well, however, and even more remarkably, I found that by the end of the three years, despite having given up on “getting anywhere” with the practice, I had nonetheless added another fifteen courses almost without thinking much about it. So now I was up to thirty Vipassana notches altogether, eight years into the practice, and around half-way to the ten-thousand-hour mark (which was not much on my mind, as it still seemed impossibly far off, and anyway not something worth troubling myself over).

     Continuing to feel a long way from proficiency (to say nothing of mastery), I began wondering whether I was perhaps missing the point somehow—despite what seemed a pretty considerable distance covered. (“What’s a few thousand hours in this kind of practice?” a particularly hard-nosed Indian teacher once set me right—not my favorite Vipassana memory). So I went on a couple of detours over the course of the next six years—not so much off the Path as alongside it, though somewhat in the thickets. Meanwhile I kept doing one retreat a year and two sittings on most days, but now at what felt like a leisurely pace. Along the way there were occasional spells when the two-hour drive would return for a couple of weeks, but not more consistently, and that seemed just as well. Even so, at the end of fourteen years all told, I found I had added yet another two thousand hours, more or less incidentally, and the ten thousand were slowly coming into view. (Not that I felt it concerned me much even then.)

     It was at this point—five years ago—that I came to a stark realization after attending a post-Christmas gathering at a friend’s house, a moment of truth if you wish. Listening to myself at what should have been a joyous and light-hearted affair, I was appalled at how full of sharp edges, how agitated, and how glum my mind continued to be. This was no way to live, especially since I had been given the tools to do otherwise so many years ago already. If I did not want to go medical, a reluctance for which I had my reasons, I would need to step up the one fundamental resource I believed I had, with welcome side-effects only, and go back to a more determined regimen of daily sittings.

     Like it or not, I concluded, the Vipassana doctors appeared to be right after all: one hour in the morning and at night was not something to be negotiated with, as I had done for so many years, but something to push for with all the determination you can muster, self-doubts be damned. Whatever steel you have left, I told myself, put it into this: what could be more wholesome? Nothing to do with the stuff that goes into blades and bullets, obviously, but more relevant than it may appear: anyone who imagines that nothing steely at all is necessary for getting a serious meditation practice off the ground, up to cruising altitude, and survivably steady during life’s sundry turbulences, must not have tried it for long. Dreams and dragons may take flight with nothing solid in their wings, but a meditation practice needs to be held together by more robust materials, though ideally they should be as light as they are tough. Industrial titanium would be ideal, and luckily its components are relatively plentiful in the world; working it all into the right shape is so energy-intensive, however, that the product is rightly considered a very precious metal indeed…

     Thus I hunkered down once again, accepting the doctor’s orders without reservations for perhaps the first time, and managed to keep up the sittings, morning and night, without fail, for a hundred days. Towards the end of that push, the closest thing to a dream job within the bounds of plausibility—the best university position I can imagine for myself in Thailand—materialized before me practically out of the blue, from one day to the next. I could not and still cannot imagine how my daily sittings could have contributed to this near-miraculous turn of events; I am only reporting on my uncanny sense of synchronicity at the time, not pretending to explain or understand it one way or another.

     For the past five years, then, which finally took me across the ten-thousand-hour line three weeks ago (#165), I have no longer been quibbling with the rationale for taking my “medicine” as prescribed. Even so, once again, I have not always been able to muster the energy and unbending resolve that would be needed to maintain the full regimen for good. Fifty days, seventy days, a hundred and twenty days the series would hold—then something would happen, the string would snap, and I would go back to a more erratic practice again. Sometimes getting through the full hour proved mentally impossible for a number of days, and I would fall back for some time to perhaps twenty or thirty minutes; eventually, after a variable number of such “weak” sittings, the light would unexpectedly come on again, for no apparent reason. The meditative energy would kick in and the hour would sit itself, as it were, no effort needed; then, just as suddenly, it would disappear again. On other occasions, a similarly unaccountable surge of determination might see me through a succession of exceedingly difficult hours on the mat, with my mind hollering for me to get up and be done with it at last (#12, #71, #86, #163). Then that too passed. Anicca.

     Over the past couple of weeks especially (within immediate proximity of the Line), as I’ve been reflecting on the past few years and looking ahead to what troubles may lie ahead, I’ve been feeling once again some of the heightened concern of five years ago, with a similar diagnosis: meditation or medication, brother (see also #32, #49, #127). To be sure, I would not claim that meditation is by itself sufficient for curing what ails me, or maybe all of us at bottom. Worldly problems call for worldly answers, and it can be unhelpful, sometimes even dangerous, to spiritualize unduly our practical difficulties in life—even if regular sittings really can make a difference, at all kinds of unobvious levels, even with the most seemingly mundane concerns. What I am more convinced of than ever is that meditation is entirely necessary for me to maintain a sound foundation upon which other things might be built, and stand.

     Take your sometimes hard-to-swallow pills, in the morning and at night, and you will at least get a handle by which to pick things up properly, even if they may remain heavy to lift and difficult to carry. (Epictetus, Enchiridion 43: “Everything has two handles, one by which it may be carried and the other not.”) Thus I find myself, at the outset of my twentieth year on the Path—the red Line now behind me—more or less back where I began in my early thirties, when I was contemplating the great leap of a first Vipassana ordeal. (At the time, no one I knew had done it, and the way I was introduced bore the marks, once again, of Jungian synchronicity, or striking coincidence if you prefer.) Back then it took me almost three years to work up my courage up and hit the right moment. What propelled me to jump at last, despite all my well-justified apprehensions about what such a ten-day trial by fire would entail, was the watch-word equanimity, which I knew from my books, the chapters on the Stoics especially (#67, #135), but to which I was personally an utter stranger.

     There were worries enough to deal with in those early thirties of mine, but I figured that however serious my troubles, at least I still had the remnants of youth on my side. Things would not get easier with the years, as sickness, ageing, and death would make their inevitable advances and encroachments. The Buddha too, one might note here in passing, was impelled towards breaking with his householder’s life and setting out as a homeless seeker upon the open road—despite his princely status, his wife, and a newborn son—on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. What at that threshold may still remain an abstraction (the menace of old age and death that the Buddha likened to a great mountain range of misery, as high as the clouds, moving in on us from all four directions at once, and crushing everything in its way (Samyutta Nikaya 3:25, see #142)) will surely become unmistakably real by forty, and inescapably so by fifty. Many good things may still lie ahead, of course: plenty of biographies have even been known to peak in their sixties, even their seventies. Yet the writing is on the wall, a little more clearly every day, and demands a response a little more urgently with every passing year.

     I know what my response will have to be, with a bow to Hillel. An unbeliever, it is said, once went to challenge and perhaps mock the great rabbi by demanding that he teach him the Torah while he, the insolent visitor, was balancing on one leg. Hillel did not take these antics amiss (unlike another teacher, Shammai, who took offense and chased the insolent visitor out of his house with a tool he was holding). Hillel smiled and answered, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it!” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a) We may imagine the Buddha smiling in his turn at hearing Hillel’s answer, and adding: “And don’t forget to take your pills on the cushion, morning and night!” When shall I, or you, or anyone, finally discover within ourselves the wherewithal to follow through seriously, without negotiation, without fail? If not now, when? (Pirkei Avot I.14)