Disclaimer:

I fully support the technique of vipassana meditation as a means of living a more balanced, equanimous, and, let us say, happy life. It is important to note however that the technique will be hard work, though probably not as hard as it has been for me in the past 20 days. But when I compare that to the life I was leading before, the difference is significant, and the difference points towards the validity of the technique in doing what it claims to do. Just to clear things up, here is what the technique claims to be (and what it doesn’t claim to be).

So, where the fuck do I start?

How about here:

This summer I tried being a writer and magic player in Iowa City and found the experience somewhat less thrilling than I’d anticipated. I returned home and decided to attend a course at the Vipassana meditation center just north of Rockford. This was an easy decision to make: I’d already tried some minor meditation (basically counting to 4) last summer and felt slightly better afterwards, the course was free, it was close, it gave me a chance to get out of the house and it claimed to be the path towards eradicating human suffering. About a 20 minute drive away, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.

The rules of the course are austere, and because I really wanted it to help me feel not quite so shitty, I followed them fairly pretty scrupulously, never even considering the option of leaving early.

The course was 10 days and basically taught 3 types of meditation. All instructions about the technique were given via audio tapes as everyone meditated together in a large hall for hour long sittings. There were 3 of these a day that were mandatory, the rest of the time you could meditate in your rooms if you wanted, but you were supposed to be meditating as per the course schedule.

The first, taught on days 1-3, is called Anapana meditation. Anapana meditation merely tries to clear the mind by allowing it to be free of thoughts. It’s astoundingly simple to learn, but equally difficult to do. Direct your attention towards your own breathing, not concentrating, just being aware, and when thoughts come into your mind and it wanders away, just bring it back patiently, without praising or blaming yourself for doing a good/bad job, since both of these distract your awareness. After a day of this we switched to focusing on a part of the body: the nose and area above the upper lip. Then after another day we narrow it to just the area above the upper lip.

During this time the greatest challenge to me was the distraction I encountered from sitting in the same position, and I allowed myself to shift position if the pain was distracting me from focused awareness, as per the instructions of the assistant teacher. It’s also worth noting that it was still difficult to meditate and I probably only used about half the unstructured meditation time for meditation. One final note is that I felt good after these sessions, like really good, as in free from worry and anxiety about the future and regret about the past. Memories would sometimes spring to mind that I had completely forgotten about, things I never could have remembered through conscious effort. I couldn’t wait to get out and tell my friends about this place and the technique. I guess I didn’t fully realize at the end of day 3 that we would be learning a new technique the next day: Vipassana meditation itself. S.N. Goenka, the one whose instructions we were listening to on the tapes and whose discourses we were watching via videocassette every evening, likened the Vipassana technique to a surgical operation, which is why people are not supposed to leave in the middle.

To explain this I’ll need to explain some of the philosophy behind the technique and then continue to recount my experience in days 4-10.

The philosophy is basically Buddhism stripped of all religious paraphernalia, trinkets, costumes, and idols. It is a technique that anyone can practice.

The teaching is that reacting to stimuli is the root of all suffering and it comes in the form of either craving or aversion. Both craving and aversion express the felt ignorance of the law of nature. Put as simply as possible, when we become attached to anything, it sets us up for deep misery when it passes away or becomes lost to us, as everything eventually does. When we have aversion towards something, it is actually this aversion itself and not the stimuli that creates misery in the form of fear, panic, or whatever. This is because we react to eternally changing stimuli as if they are permanent. Pain itself is not the cause of misery; our reaction to it is, and this reaction is typically aversion (unless you’re a masochist, in which case it would be craving).

Now back to day 4, when we begin the actual technique of vipassana. This technique is purifying because it gets below the surface and attempts to break the habit-pattern of reaction that our minds naturally have, Goenka likens it several times to a surgical operation on the mind. The technique itself is again so simple that it seems like it could never actually work: You move from observing respiration to observing parts of the body. But the important, most vital element of this observation is that you do it equanimously. It’s a feedback loop type of process: the more you observe, with a calm and tranquil mind, impassive and unconcerned with whether you notice sensation, the more sensation you will become aware of and the more your “faculty of awareness” will develop. The feedback loop works in the other direction as well: The more concerned you are with either craving pleasant sensations or averring unpleasant ones, the less your capacity for awareness will develop and you will feel only the usual gross sensations that you always do, such as pain in the legs from sitting cross-legged for an hour.

In any case, on day 4 at 3:00 PM we are introduced to the technique of vipassana meditation. We do have to take a verbal oath to commit ourselves fully to the technique for the next 7 days, which I do without reservation. Now is the point where things start to get just a bit weird. I should note that before this technique, when we were just observing the area above the upper lip, I was definitely feeling sensations there that I was not aware of before learning the technique, usually slight tingling sensations that would, later on in the course, be referred to as “subtle” sensations.

After we have taken the oath, we are given step by step instructions in the vipassana technique, and the chanting leading up to these instructions seems slightly different than the chanting that has come before during the Anapana sessions. I am relaxed and alert, ready to meditate, when something kind of strange happens. When Goenka says the phrase “now direct your entire attention to the area above the upper lip” I start straight up on my cushion and feel intense tingling sensations on the left and right side of my head. It occurs to me immediately that I may have just been hypnotized, which generates strong sensations of excitement. I try my best to be equanimous, since I still have strong faith in the technique, and continue following the directions for Vipassana.

Again, the technique is very simple. You direct your attention to an area of the body and observe it, gaining both equanimity and awareness in equal portions, at least that’s how it should work in theory. You start at the top of the head, then move down observing part by part, bit by bit. When you reach the bottom, you start again at the top. That’s it. You are also supposed to avoid moving as much as possible during the meditation because it will distract and disrupt your attention. I tried to follow this, and I believe this is where I made my first mistake.

Sitting cross legged for an hour can range from uncomfortable to painful and back to painless, depending on how well developed your equanimity and faculty of awareness are. I was not even doing it straight up on the floor, but with cushions and my back resting against a wall. I was following the technique and observing sensation on the body, but the mistake I made was to try and steel my resolve and sit, even when I was feeling pain and not feeling equanimous towards it. I unintentionally generated craving in this way: craving for pain, which I could then steel myself through and observe. This was, I believe driven by pride to learn and develop in the technique quickly. But I was not observing equanimously, yet I was observing and my faculty of observation was growing, but it was out of sync with equanimity. I believe this played a part in my future problems.

We were asked to try and sit without uncrossing the legs or moving much during 3 sittings a day after this, sittings dubbed “periods of strong determination.”

During the next session I make a concerted effort to sit through the whole hour without uncrossing my legs and succeed, but like I said, I probably generate craving for pain in the process, since I don’t remain equanimous. However this is a minor problem compared to the next one I create for myself.

During days 4-7 I develop the faculty of awareness a lot, so much so that I cannot help but notice a kind of pressure in two areas whenever I sit down to meditate: No matter where I direct my attention it seems as if there is some pressure, a kind of faint throbbing or tensing, in the nerve going from the roof of my mouth, behind my nose, and up to an area above my two eyes in my lower forehead and inward. I had heard random things here and there about the “third eye” and realized that this area where I was feeling intense throbbing is precisely where it is supposed to be. I tentatively ask the teacher if he knows about the third eye and he responds “What’s that?” I kind of brush it off and say I’m not sure (because I’m really not sure) but ask if it plays any part in this technique. He responds firmly but without any trace of alarm that it does not. I thank him and try to go back to meditating. I believe this question occurred on day 5 or 6. I experiment a little to see if this is a headache I am getting by unconsciously moving my eyes when I direct my attention to various parts of the body, both my meditating with eyes open and by holding my fingers over my eyes while meditating and scanning the body. By day 7 I am convinced that it isn’t my eyes moving; it’s something else just above my eyes, in the middle lower forehead, and inward. I spoke to the teacher again about this and he insisted that there was nothing special about this area, sankaras can manifest themselves in any way and in any area. In the case of someone with an old football injury, for instance, the leg could be the source of intense sensation. He assures me again that there is no center of awareness: “Keep looking.”

It is at this point that the idea of sankaras needs to be introduced. Sankaras are the buried instances of craving and aversion from the past that get implanted in the brain and in a sense “painted over” by the continuing habit pattern of the mind. Equanimous observation of sensation is supposed to unearth these sankaras, which can manifest in literally any form, memory, light flashes, sensation, pressure, tension, and any number of other ways. When they manifest themselves, you are supposed to do the same thing you have been doing: Scanning the body without craving and aversion, not lingering over any particular part with craving or aversion, but everywhere with equanimity. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

The idea begins to worm its way into my head that since this thing, this pressure and throbbing is always present when I meditate, it must be one of these sankaras, a particularly strong one. Also on I believe day 7 or 8, we have learned to scan both sides of the body simultaneously and hemispherically (ie: right and left leg together, etc). I had already started doing this the day before, it just seemed like the natural thing to do. On the end of day 7 or the beginning of day 8, we learn the next last step in the technique.

Now it is worth pointing out that this technique, though not officially Buddhist, has its origins in Buddhist philosophy, the ultimate goal of which is enlightenment. It is also worth pointing out that it took Gautama Buddha until the age of 35 to become fully enlightened, and he practiced almost every moment and started at age 6. It is also worth pointing out that this is only a 10 day course, and not all the techniques that one hears about are ones that a person is going to be ready to implement in practice. It’s worth noting that now for your benefit, even if I failed to note that to myself at the time for my own benefit.

The last technique we learned about was going inward. Basically, if we felt a uniform free flow of subtle sensations throughout the body (which to me manifested as mildly pleasant tingling sensations), then we could feel free to pick a point, a very fine point on the body, and try going through the body from one side to the other, with a “piercing penetrating” awareness. This is the next step in increasing the twin attributes of awareness and equanimity. By the time we learned of this technique, we were also supposed to be in a state of constant awareness either of respiration or sensation (days 8 and 9).

In my own room, practicing, I believe on the afternoon of day 8, I tried implementing this going inward procedure once I felt I had a uniform free flow going. I can’t quite remember whether I did or not, but I am pretty sure I must not have, my awareness was not sharp enough to be attempting this but I did anyway. First I drove the awareness inward to my right hand. While doing this I felt the pressure and tension increase in a particular area in the third eye region, honest to god. Afterwards it seemed that it had worked and my awareness of sensation in that hand was much more powerful. So, with the possibility that the area of pressure was a sankara floating around in my mind, I next tried the technique of penetration on my skull.

After doing this, I felt as if a muscle had been overworked. I also felt the veins and blood vessels in my head throbbing. “Is this just a coincidental throbbing headache?” I asked myself somewhat bemusedly. Obviously not, it was merely me developing my faculty of awareness to be aware of sensations that I could not have been aware of before. I had a mild sense of self-satisfaction combined with some worry about why the teacher had denied anything special about this third eye region when there obviously was something special about it. Needless to say, self-satisfaction and anxiety are not the same as equanimity.

Regardless, I continue in the state of constant awareness, and it gradually shifts from something I have to do to something I do automatically. I have more awareness of what seem like blood vessels in the body and the in the skull area surrounding the brain but not in the brain itself.

I can’t really remember the rest of days 8 and 9 except to say that the sensations grew stronger, my awareness of them deeper, and my equanimity towards them shrank. During the evening session from 6-7 on the 9^th night I *think* I feel like I have it under control and can scan normally, moving part by part or flowing without getting stuck on any one sensation. After either the session or the discourse I question the instructor again about the significance of that region and how strong it’s growing and he sounds slightly exasperated as he tells me its nothing special. This causes sensations of panic and anxiety in me that are almost impossible to control, because I am worried that the teacher either is lying or doesn’t have the experience to guide me through this, and if necessary, out of this state of heightened awareness.

So during the brief session after the discourse I have an acute panic attack and have to leave the hall. Niraj the student manager comes out to confirm that nothing is physically wrong and I tell him what happened. I go back in afterwards to speak with the teacher and he tells me to focus on an extremity to calm down. It works. He gives me some other guidance and reassurance that I can’t remember right now and I go try to sleep. Basically when I get back to my room that night, in a state more of exhaustion than equanimity, I let “the eye do its own work” It seems like it is tracing a path of awareness around the inside of my skull beneath the cheeks, nose, forehead, and the upper half of the skull in general. I feel as if it was undoing all the anxiety I had previously built up, as if my subjective awareness was going backwards, but I can’t say for sure. All I can say is that during this period I did not react to my own awareness, and eventually fell asleep and got about 2-3 hours of sleep, waking up naturally at 3 AM (The morning bell is at 4 for those counting at home).

On day 10, the silence is to be broken after 10 AM. I go to the hall right at 4 AM and start trying to meditate using the scanning technique but the throbbing in the nerve on the roof of my mouth, or blood vessel or whatever it is, and up to the “3^rd eye” area is so intense I have to stop and ask Niraj at breakfast to talk to the teacher before the morning session.

During breakfast I feel like I have been conned or duped and start to get angry and lose equanimity, even though I’m not sure who or what I’m angry at. Myself for going too quickly? The instructor, for lying about the importance of the 3^rd eye region? During my interview with him I tell him that I think I am losing my grip on reality. I mention everything about the 3^rd eye region, including the fact that the region appears to have reverse hemispheric division like the rest of the brain (ie: when I direct it to some place on my right side, I can feel something on the left side of the region moving. He does not address the objective validity or falsity of these sensations or observations, but again tries to reassure me, repeating again that I should back off and stop meditating or go to another area if it seems to strong. However

A) It’s getting almost impossible to back off because the sensation (pulsing/throbbing) is so strong in that particular area, and only increases when I close my eyes.

B) The whole key to the technique is observing neutrally in order to bring to the surface sankaras of craving and aversions from the past.

Therefore I remain stuck all day, not knowing what to do, “walking the edge of the razor” as my teacher put it in the interview I had earlier between awareness and equanimity. Except at this point the razor feels too big and my balance not good enough.

On the morning of the 10^th day, after my interview, we learn a technique called metta-bhavana (loving-kindness or good will towards all), which is a meditation technique in which the purity developed during the course is shared with all beings. I tried my best to participate in this compassion meditation, but didn’t do that great of a job, overwhelmed as I was by the awareness of what I believe was blood flow underneath my skin, especially in the upper head area. I also faintly became aware during this meditation of the beating of my own heart.

After this meditation the noble silence is broken and I try to integrate myself with external society and the fellow course goers, all of whom seem to be in pretty good, or at least talkative moods. But it makes me uneasy that I can still feel the throbbing. Niraj tries to distract me and calm me down, but there is an undercurrent of panic in me all day because, I suppose I expected the throbbing to go away immediately upon the breaking of the noble silence. Looking back, this is one of many misapprehensions that now seem silly, but without much sleep and integration with outside society, the mind can convince itself of many strange things. Of course if it took a while to develop, it’s probably not going to go away just like that in the snap of a finger. Nevertheless, the fact that it remained, though quiet, disquieted my mind. I walk out of the afternoon session, not being able to handle it.

I skip the evening session and finally decide that since this sensation isn’t going away, I have to deal with it. It seems as if I have developed two kinds of awareness now, one in which I can go forward and trace new connections, and one in which I can reverse it and go backwards in time. I let the one that goes forwards, naturally go where it wants to go, and it goes up to itself, as if the eye is focusing on itself. One of the many fears I had to get through at this point was that something was physically building inside my head and that all the blood vessels in my eyes would burst and I would just bleed to death. I finally conquer all these fears and let it go through all the way. When it does, I feel an incredible sense of peace and well being. My eyes are perfectly fine, and look clearer than before. I also feel more aware of sensations throughout my body, without any particular effort at meditation. I go to the evening discourse in a good mood, ready to experiment. As Goenka is giving his discourse on video (all of which were extremely reassuring and insightful btw), I try one more thing with the 2^nd kind of awareness, directing it to unwind the string of awareness and connections that I feel I have been building, running the direction of the course of time and awareness backwards, so to speak. As I do this my head starts rocking slightly, then more and more, the more I continue the more my head rocks back, eventually going down to the neck and upper spine. I get to a point where if I do any more I feel like I will break my own neck. Completely convinced that I can’t go back without dying, I resolve to go forward and live with whatever new awareness “the eye” decides to bestow upon me. The only problem (or problem as I saw it then) was that I can’t really sleep, and the “eye” now seems to be directing my awareness, rather than the “I” that had been up till then. Nevertheless I still feel an amazing sense of inner peace and tranquility. At the end of the discourse I bow, ever so faintly, along with many of the other meditators. I thank the assistant teacher for his patience and equanimity in dealing with me after the lecture, and head back to go to bed.

I get involved in conversation until about 10 with all the other course goers, all of whom are eager to share their experiences and evaluations of the course after being forced to be silent for 9 days. Listening to others feels so good at this point to me; I think I am truly on the right path. I finally go to bed around 10, but when I close my eyes, the other eye opens and begins tracing a new path: This time firmly and incontrovertibly down to my heart. I struggle to deal with this for about two hours, forcing it back, generating new sankaras of aversion each time the awareness expands, worrying about whether I will accidentally slow my heart down to the point that it stops beating, or speed it up until it bursts. I have to keep reminding myself that I am only becoming aware of what was already there, but it is difficult nevertheless. The anxiety I am generating makes it impossible to sleep and I feel extremely thirsty. I go back to the meditation hall to get more water and run into Tim, the guy who runs the center and is sometimes an assistant teacher but was not for my course. I talk to him for a bit about what is happening, but he evades giving me a solid answer about whether what I am experiencing is “real.” He encourages me to try and get some sleep and gives me a banana that he happens to have. I go back to my room around 12:30 and continue tentatively expanding the awareness to the neck and heart. I continue drinking a lot of water and being in a high state of anxiety. I run into another older course attendee in the hallway who was coming back from a midnight run to the kitchen, and ask him if he has a stopwatch, and if he knows what the normal beats per minute of a heart is. Such is the nature of my habit-pattern: I still do not trust my heart to continue doing what it has been doing my whole life once I gain awareness of it. He invites me in for a chat, reassures me that I can’t control the heart, and he had some similar psychosomatic illusions and problems in his days, like a whistle was coming out of the top of the head. We go through some timings of our beats per minute (dividing appropriately for systolic and diastolic). I feel fairly reassured at this point that it’s ok, and I snag an alarm clock from the hall that has a second counter so I can continue to reassure myself.

I am now starting to panic about the fact that I can’t sleep however. Every time I close my eyes the beating of my own heart freaks me out. I continue to drink and pee at an unhealthy anxious pace, and decide I might as well go for a night walk since I can’t sleep and get more water. I meet Tim again on the way out and he is more forthright and stern with me this time. I ask him what the hell is going on with me, insist that I don’t know what to do and I can’t sleep and he gives it to me straight: “You’re going to drive yourself crazy if you keep reacting to it. Go try to sleep, focus on an extremity or whatever, just lay down.” I try again to figure out exactly how to deal with these sensations, I ask if the throbbing in that particular region of my head is a sankara.

“Life’s a sankara.” He responds.

I take his advice and go back to my room, having taken to heart the one thing that let me get through it, and kept me from running to someone else for comfort, something that I knew was true the instant he said it:

You are your own master.

So I didn’t get more water. I went back inside, lied down, and let my body rest even if my mind couldn’t. I continued scanning the extremities and eventually got about 2 hours of sleep before the morning bell. I went to the morning meditation, feeling cold, and kept scanning throughout the body as instructed. Afterwards I thanked the assistant teacher again for his patience and mentioned that in order to get through the intensity of the sensations, I had to come to grips with the fact that they might never go away. He insisted, once again, that they would. I thanked him again and went to breakfast, then to cleaning my room, talking with my new friend Niraj and everyone else there. The sensation in the 3^rd eye region and vein were still there, they still felt engorged as it were, but duller when I was interacting with the external world. My parents eventually arrived, I greeted them warmly, tranquilly, and I said goodbye to the folks at the center and got in the car to go home.

I was fine in the car for maybe a few minutes until I realized that the awareness was still there. For some reason I suppose I expected it, as I previously mentioned, to disappear instantly the second I reconnected with “society.” I failed to recognize that since the process of growing internal awareness took time, the redirection of that faculty to the external world would also take time. As the conversation of my parents seemed more and more like background I began to panic. When we got home I acted like everything was normal, but I was really going into high panic mode, generating more sankaras of aversion every second. Eventually after getting home and staying there, I had to tell my parents about what had happened and what I was feeling. As they listened attentively, concerned only for my well being, I felt a flood of subtle pleasant sensations wash over my body that I found it very difficult to be equanimous towards. My panic however, did disappear, and I convinced myself again that whatever I was feeling, I could develop the capacity to deal with it. I tried to sleep for a bit but couldn’t, the awareness of my body just kept spreading as the “eye” surveyed my internal organs. But I didn’t panic because I knew there were people around who would help me get through it, and besides, what choice did I have?

Having made this resolution, I again felt an incredible sense of inner peace and well being, and agreed to go to the synagogue picnic with my parents. This is significant because my relationship with the synagogue was not really a good one in the past. I had my bar-mitzvah fairly reluctantly and the place felt like a prison whenever I was there. But as I walked in, I found myself surveying each and every individual with supreme benevolence. I didn’t think about my history or my attitude towards the religion at all, merely of the fact that these were all mere human beings struggling to be happy without really knowing how to go about it. I was friendly and warm to everyone and felt good and genuine while being so. After a little while I did start to get tired though, so I went to go rest in the car. As soon as I closed my eyes, the 3^rd eye opened and I became acutely aware of blood vessels throbbing underneath my skin and tingling sensations all over the surface. I was not sure if this was good rest, I was not sure if this was the only sleep I would ever get again. At this point I had gotten about 4-5 hours of genuine sleep in the past 48 hours. I felt kind of tired, but not really. We went home and I resolved to keep going through the body with the eye as long as I couldn’t sleep. I steeled myself and let it go to the heart, and the awareness of my own beating heart became stronger and fuller, like a cup being filled up with water. It then seemed to go on to veins on the left side of my chest, then my lungs and diaphragm. This was all a struggle to accept equanimously, but after each step I felt more inner peace and tranquility than before when I opened my eyes to experience the outside world. At some point early on in my return to home I looked up “third eye” on google and found this wikipedia entry. It not only confirmed my suspicions about the uniqueness of that region but suggested to me where I needed to go next: Up into the brain, particularly the pineal gland, the site of the interaction of mind and matter. I thought about this consciously, but I feel the eye already had that aim in mind. After I “conquer” self-awareness of the heart and lungs, I lie down in the late afternoon to try and get some rest, and the eye starts going up my spine. It gets to the upper spine with me having equanimity towards it before I…not panic, but question whether I am ready for such a step. I am also starting to grow weary with despair of ever sleeping again, even though I don’t feel nearly as tired as I probably should. The rest of the afternoon and evening is hazy, except that I remember telling my mother that I thought I was going crazy because the eye seemed to be all out of whack and her saying she didn’t think I was, because I was giving rational explanations of what I was feeling and doing. This reassured me, and as I laid down to rest/sleep that evening around 4 or 5 PM, I remember thinking that I would just ride whatever wave came because I wasn’t crazy and I could handle it. What happened then was that the eye seemed to go back in time over all the experiences of awareness that I reacted to with aversion that afternoon when I thought I was going insane, and this time, as it was “retracing its steps,” I didn’t react but merely observed in a quiet, restful state. I woke up around 9 PM, again feeling refreshed and full of inner peace and tranquility. I stayed up checking plans and ate some toasted cheese and bread and soup, but found myself still very detached from the external world that wasn’t my body. As I went to bed around 12 or so, I decided equanimity was the best course, recalling all I had gone through already.

But then I felt something strange: The eye no longer wanted to continue: I could feel it starting to “flow back” and feel myself starting to lose awareness of all the organs and blood vessels. “No,” I thought “I could let it go, but I worked so hard, why not go further?” I let it unwind a bit and then brought it back along the path that had been traced. I’m still not sure whether it took “effort” to keep the eye moving forward rather than flowing back, at that point I think the decision was wholly mine and there were no internal pressures pointing either way. I chose to go forward to the point I was at when it initially started to flow back, then I “held it” and slept.

When I woke up about 4 hours later, I felt like I had strained a muscle in my head, and went to watch TV and let the awareness flow back this time. But it was kind of hurting, and it was extremely difficult to distract myself, plus I remembered that my teacher had said not to do so. After about an hour hovering in the middle again, I decided to go back to bed, resolved to go through and become a yogic seer or die or whatever the hell was going to happen. I laid in bed around 5:30, closed my eyes, and let the eye move forward, regaining awareness quickly of the heart lungs and spine and then, either letting it go forward or pushing it forward, I’m still not quite sure which, it entered the brain up through the base, I felt it reach where I thought (based on the wiki entry) where the pineal gland was. As this was happening, my heart rate started to increase, muscles started to twitch and my eyes started to flutter. The further I went the more intense every sensation became. As it progressed I chanted to myself a word of reassurance that I had learned from the vipassana course, “anicca” “anicca.”

It progressed through the pineal gland, with me facing it and reassuring myself at every moment that if this meant I had to die it would be ok, because all things change. Then it went up through the two hemispheres of the brain, along the corpus collosum and then up to the soft spot on the top of the head, which, no coincidence I assume, was where Goenka taught us to start at the beginning of the Vipassana meditation section of the course I attended.

Oh yeah, and while this was occurring internally, I was having a seizure, actually as it turned out, inducing a seizure in myself, which became more and more intense the further I went. Was this seizure a reaction to the new awareness or a sign of a lack of reaction and the presence of equanimity? I’m still not sure, all I know was that I had resolved to go through come what may. When I reached the top of the head I, I stopped seizing abruptly and was still, my heart rate returning to normal. My parents rushed into the room, having heard it from their room.

The calmness and placidity I had then is something I am not sure I will ever achieve again. I informed them with perfect equanimity that I had a seizure, but I was ok now, and I had gone through the brain. What else I felt besides equanimity is hard to describe, but it seemed that I was aware of something else, perhaps my own thoughts, or the vibrations that give rise to thoughts? It is extremely hard to recall, let alone describe, what it felt like exactly, all I know is that it was weird. It felt more like waves of some kind, and I also believed that I had gained the ability to control my body temperature. Again, I did not feel bad exactly, but just supremely weird. And oh yeah, there did seem to be a kind of glow around objects, especially when I let my eyes focus on them for any length of time. I hesitate to use the word aura, but I have to because I can’t think of anything better.

I was having some crazy thoughts at this point. I thought of myself as contacting Goenka, swamis, shamans, the scientific community and leading the research to figure out the interaction of mind and body, unifying western and eastern knowledge, with me as both the main subject of research and assistant researcher. The thought also occurred somewhere in me that I may have physically changed my brain in this process so that I had given myself epilepsy. Tim’s comment to me that “Life is a Sankara” echoed in my mind. How could I really be free of attachment unless I transcended the body? And if this process of gaining inner awareness was actually equivalent to lesioning parts of the brain with whatever causes epilepsy, then maybe I was going to keep having epileptic seizures until I died/became unentwined with my earthly form. Would this be a bad thing? No, I resolved, everyone dies. But I didn’t want to go yet. I wanted to continue living for a while, kind of normally, kind of happily. Was this aversion? Was I making it worse for myself to hang around, to want to hang around for the sake of others who wanted me here? Everything ran through my head as I started to compose a letter to my assistant teacher describing, as objectively as possible, what had gone on and asking his advice on what I should do. Along with the intensity of these thoughts, weird wavelike sensations and others I couldn’t even describe if I tried went through me, and I probably reacted to them more with amazement than equanimity.

Then my mother decided to call the teacher. I was hesitant to do this, because, as they said, everyone’s experience is different, and you have to fight your own battles. But I was feeling extremely weird. When I talked to him, I mentioned that I was confused as to why he lied about the 3^rd eye area when it was so clearly a distinct part of the body, and commented on the weird feelings I was having and my inability to sleep. At this point he gave me advice that both almost led to my death and eventually brought me back to earth.

“You obviously had a very intense experience. Don’t focus on the intense sensations, go to the extremities and the outside. And don’t focus on not focusing, just direct your attention without worrying about where your attention is.” Something to this effect is what he said. It was perfectly sound advice and would have worked perfectly if not for the fact that he sounded seriously worried as he uttered it.

Panic has been a frequent theme in this story, a microcosm of my own life. At this point the most intense panic attack that I have ever had began. Every time I tried to redirect my attention outwards I noticed how hard I was trying to redirect my attention outwards. Meanwhile I remained perfectly calm on the surface as the anxiety inside and my reactions to it spiraled further and further. My parents had made a doctor’s appointment by this point but I believed it would be too late, and a normal doctor wouldn’t understand this anyway. My dad had to go to work at this point and my mom asked if I wanted breakfast, like an egg mcmuffin. I told her yes, and I would wait here.

When they drove away I had resolved to kill myself. Here’s why: I had convinced myself that I had actually lesioned my brain by developing this faculty of awareness and following it through, and that I would continue having more and more frequent seizures (as I had remembered from a sensation and perception class that seizures tend to become more and more frequent the more they occur) until I died, at the time I thought the cause would be me swallowing my own tongue. I later found out this wasn’t possible, but I was under that impression at the time. As people who have had a panic attack know, the adrenaline coursing through your veins can make you do things you would never normally do or dream of doing, and every belief or assumption is amplified to the status of truth. This is an evolutionarily useful mechanism. It is the fight or flight response.

Except in this case my fight or flight options, as I surveyed them to myself were: keep having seizures until you die and transcend the physical realm, or choose your own death in some other way. I’m not sure whether this represents fight or flight, but I chose to chose another way, any other way, out.

Warning: At this point, if this story hasn’t already been distressing, it may become so.

I went into the kitchen and opened the knife drawer, with a sense of detachment. I went through knife after knife, stabbing deep: none of them were very sharp, fortunately. I dug deep, and each cut seemed to relieve the intense throbbing of panic/anxiety I felt deep within. It could tell it wasn’t going to be enough to do me in though. I went out into the living room where a seizure that I “felt” coming (ie had autohypnotized myself into believing was going to occur) occurred and I fell to the floor and did that for a bit. Then I got back up, walked out to the driveway and contemplated throwing myself into traffic. I decided I wasn’t quite right for that yet. I went back inside into the kitchen and started cutting again, this time on the other hand, but every knife I tried just sucked and wouldn’t go deep enough, I wasn’t actually strong enough to do it. At this point I was freaking out more and more because I “knew” I was going to die from seizures but wanted to find another way out, one that I could control. I went up to the front of the hall before the doorway and tried to snap my own neck. “Quick and painless,” I reasoned to myself. I fell to the floor but it hadn’t worked, I was still alive. At this point I just gave up, went out into the driveway, got a running start and threw myself into a passing car. I think that for a split second I debated between diving under the wheels and throwing myself towards the upper portion of the car. For whatever reason, I decided on the upper part and it probably saved my life.

The street in front of my house has a speed limit of 40 MPH, and the driver of the car saw me and honked at me and presumably slowed down before I hit it, so not only did I not die, I didn’t break anything and was still semi conscious, though not able to move or talk, as traffic stopped and people started gathering around.

At this point my own personal concept of hell began swirling around in my mind. Since I didn’t believe in any kind of transcendence of the body still at that point, I envisioned myself trapped in a feedback loop of panic and anxiety, while hooked up to a respirator, a vegetable. Not an infinite hell, but still a long time of it. That is why, while laying on the pavement, I was able to say two things to the surrounding crowd: that I had epilepsy, and that I wanted them to kill me. I didn’t say anything else, but proceeded to have two more “seizures” on the pavement before the ambulance got there. As they hooked me up and began the process of getting me well physically, my own imagination of being a tortured vegetable for the rest of my life became clearer in my head, and I began to laugh, ever so slightly, at the idea. When they asked me my name, I wouldn’t tell them, and I’m not sure about this, but I believe when they initially gave me morphine I began to actually wake up, so strong was my psychosomatic reaction to the strong sensation of the drug. I tried to fight them off and said “The more of that you give me, the more I’ll wake up.” They obviously disregarded that nonsense and held me down, giving me more. I also believe I seized a couple of times and had something placed in my mouth to prevent me from swallowing the tongue, although I’m again not completely sure about this. Throughout all this I had given in to whatever fate awaited me, and chanted “Anicha” over and over to myself. What will be, will be. The morphine finally took effect and I think I went almost completely unconscious, although I still vaguely remember going through an MRI or PETscan machine, I’d been through one before a long time ago when I was a child for an intense sinus headache.

When I came more fully awake, I was on a table or bed of some kind, and the first thought was that I was going to be conscious while they operated on me without them knowing it. Actually, they commented that I was starting to wake up, so that partially assuaged my fear, but as soon as I could move my hand I started to fight them off again. They placed it back and I realized that if I was going to get better I needed to resolve myself to regard any pain or situation with equanimity. Turns out they weren’t going to operate because, amazingly, I had sustained no major injuries. I did have a respirator breathing for me, so the idea that perhaps I would be hooked up to it forever occurred to me, and I resolved to accept it if it was true. Then I started to calm down and just observe what was going on around me. I heard the nurses talking about me, about my parents. “Polar opposites” was how they described them, I guessed from this that my mom was really freaked and my dad was absurdly composed. I came to realize that I also had a tube down my throat draining my saliva. It was uncomfortable, but in a reassuringly normal way. I was pretty much calmed down and back to normal at this point.

After a while they test me to make sure I’m responsive, I am, and my parents come in. I remained calm, I don’t know how they were feeling, but I’m guessing it was relief that I was still alive. We talk for a bit, I explain what was going on in my mind, and they reassure me that the MRI scans came out negative. My brain is fine, no lesions, no epilepsy. It was all self-suggested. We are good for a while, then I get anxious because my awareness starts to come back and I don’t know when I will see the psychiatrist or if it will be soon enough. I realize at this point again the advice Van gave me, focus on extremeties and be externally focused. I ask my Dad to tell me about what he was going to teach in the class he had to cancel. I ask him about what his afternoon class would be about. Throughout all this, I focus my attention on what he is saying and listen carefully. I feel the panic recede, but I manage not to focus or get distracted or reacted by its recession, being merely aware, just aware, as Goenka said over and over in the courses.

The panic recedes and eventually they wheel me up to a hospital room. I am still hyperattentive to the outside, and ask the nurse wheeling me what her name is. It’s “Charmin.” Clearly there’s a story behind a name like that. Turns out her parents had picked out an African name but forgot it when she was born. There was a commercial for Charmin toilet paper on when her mother gave birth, so they chose that one.

That’s a story alright.

I’m pretty calm by the time I get wheeled up and into my room and I start telling my story to the nurse’s aide. As the attention “flows out” from the eye, I can feel myself starting to come back down to earth, and I finally start feeling like, for instance, someone who hasn’t slept more than 6 hours of the past 72 and has just been hit by a car might feel.

As I describe what happened to the initial psychiatric evaluator (not the actual psychiatrist), I can feel the awareness start to flow back, and again I react to it, not quite as strongly, but more consistently. Eventually the psychiatrist comes back in, and at this point I am in the midst of another panic attack, because my head feels like it is swelling, and the upper portion, from the upper lip upward, feels about a size too big. I should mention that this feeling is continuous with how my head felt every time I felt the awareness growing; it was as if new connections were being forged or new blood vessels being built. It is much more intense because of the panic however, and my own cyclic reaction to it, a reaction of aversion, as if I am fighting against feeling the sensation. This time however, I stop to consider the fact that I was wrong before about my brain having been damaged. I ask myself whether my head will burst if I stop fighting the feeling. It feels way too large “on the inside,” but, I realize, it doesn’t look large to anyone else. I run my tongue along the inside of my upper lip. It feels a bit swollen from getting knocked around by a car, but not as swollen as it does to my inner awareness. All this is happening inside as I struggle to express the important points of my story and current sensations to the psychiatrist, a taciturn Indian man, Dr. D’souza. Finally, after taking some anti-anxiety medication, I ask the doctor point blank whether I should just let it go and focus the awareness where it seems to want to go and stop fighting. He says yes go ahead. I do.

My head swells more for about 2 seconds and then my head drops back on the pillow, and I raise it up again almost immediately, feeling refreshed and invigorated and full of good will towards all beings. Also my head now feels two sizes too big. However I also feel like I’ve gained a lot of resolve and energy from “letting go.” It’s as if my equanimity has been regenerated. This time, I resolve to focus my attention to the extremities and on external things, words, people, objects, stories, until all the internal awareness has flowed back out. I concentrate, resolved not to “check my progress” until I fall asleep and I can’t help it anymore. Turns out there is plenty to attend to because I am being moved to the psych ward in another hospital, so I get to take another trip in an ambulance.

The whole way there I am looking around at my surroundings like a newborn child. I ask the driver his name and he tells me, seeming annoyed. That’s alright, I can pay attention to things beyond him, like my hands, and the walls, the motion of the stretcher, the flashing street and car lights visible from the back window of the ambulance. I tell the other EMT sitting in the back with me that I appreciate the work they do. Benevolence and attention are flowing outwards. When I get situated in the psych ward, they give me some drugs, and by this time it seems like a lot of the awareness has flowed back out, and I am back to feeling like I’ve been hit by a car, like I actually have. Before hitting the hay I talk to the nurses I think, and a fellow warder named Luis stares at me for a few seconds as he hovers outside my room. I look back, nonthreateningly, without craving or aversion “You don’t scare me,” he says. “I’m not trying to,” responds my father, mistakenly thinking that the comment was intended for him. I say nothing, knowing that as long as I really am not trying to, no negative reactions will result. After this I fall fast asleep on the adjustable bed, and I can’t remember whether I dreamt or not. The day all this happened, my suicide attempt in the morning, my final focus of strong determination on the ride to the psych ward, was September 11^th, 2006, which in addition to the obvious, was also the day my mother’s father died, for all you superstitious nuts out there.

The next 7 days I spent in the psych ward were ones of constant and continual renewal and recovery. I woke up the next morning ready to do what I needed to do to get well, without much anxiety and/or fear. Granted, a lot of what I felt was probably clouded/created by certain drugs I was taking (Zyprexa 10 MGs a day at night (an anti-psychotic, which I am still on at a dose of 7.5), and 1 MG of klonopin (anti-anxiety, no longer on) mornings and evenings. But I had mental healing to do, and it became more and more obvious to me that the more I honestly engaged in the groups and with the other patients, the better I felt and would become. A lot of the group therapy sessions expressed the same ideas that the vipassana course had, but at a larger, grosser level of analysis. I understood complexes that I had felt as sensations earlier at a bigger level of analysis. Just to list some of these that I feel like I dealt with additionally, the first and foremost is a perfectionism complex, where I feel like everything I do has to be great, which consequently keeps me from actively and genuinely engaging with the changing world that is not perfect. I spent some time in my junior year figuring out intellectually that perfection doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, and that trying for it makes you miserable, but it took the past 20 days to realize it at an emotional and experiential level. Extreme self-hatred was another, related complex that I realized I had been acting under. Intimately tied up with the perfectionism complex: when things aren’t perfect, you hate yourself. Again, I realized intellectually long ago that if projects can’t be perfect, neither can people, in fact the idea itself is absurd. But intellectual understanding isn’t enough, and in fact is dangerous if viewed as a substitute for emotional and experiential knowledge, which I believe for a long time I did. If I hated the world for not being perfect, I hated myself even more for not being so, for not compensating for the imperfect world.

In any case I believed the group sessions helped me realize the way my own attitude affected my self-image, and most importantly I tried genuinely to offer helpful advice to others in the group at the time. There was one woman, Kim, who seemed like she would be there for a long time. I realized this at first when she told me she didn’t have an official diagnosis. A patient in a psych ward always has a diagnosis, even if it’s one that they have to make up because they don’t know what the hell is going on, like mine was (Schizoform disorder, for the record). Kim was talking to others constantly, I would say complaining, except she seemed to view it more as a job than as an outlet. She had all sorts of shit to deal with, no doubt, from legal troubles, to regulating her sodium (apparently she initially came in to the ER for symptoms of low sodium resulting from drinking too much water, then when they dealt with that they sent her to the psych ward). I tried my best to listen to Kim, both for her own benefit and mine, and I feel like we both did benefit. The morning of my first full day there Luis stopped being suspicious of me when I ate breakfast without threatening him or being threatened by him or the loud volume on the Spanish channel he was watching. After I was done he took my garbage, wrappers and such, and threw them out.

“Gracias,” I said.

“Por nada,” he replied. He asked whether I spoke Spanish and I admitted that I didn’t really. We played some games of connect 4 later that day and it was all good from then on. Luis was in there for setting things on fire, and he couldn’t really tell me why. The final character worth mentioning was Drew. Whenever Drew spoke he sounded perfectly fine and rational, but he did not speak much, opting rather to pace the halls night and day fairly incessantly. Drew had a family that he talked to normally on the phone and who even visited him. My best guess was that Drew had some kind of nervous breakdown and just needed some time to deal with it. We played a game of Outburst on the final day there, a day before he was scheduled to have a court appearance that would determine whether he would be in the psych ward for another 30 days, an option that he made clear he did not feel good about. I wonder now what the decision was, and will make a note to ask my social worker during our next meeting.

Drew’s case appeared to exemplify the same razor’s edge I’d been walking. My guess was that if he could just find some way to calm down and experience the tide of emotions he was experiencing without reacting to them, they’d find him competent to go home. But if he could do that, the problems that caused him to be here wouldn’t have affected him as much in the first place? How to do it?

A very old, very simple technique that is very hard work. I believe I told him about anapana meditation, I definitely told Kim, and I’d like to think that I was able to help them as much as they were able to help me.

After a week in the psych ward, I was deemed competent to go home.

Right now it’s Thursday, September 21, 2006, and I am wrapping up this story. I am on Zyprexa and starting to return to an earthly state. I have committed to making things right, and that means taking the medication for as long as they say I need it, going to therapy and being under “supervision” for a while (Dr. D’souza said 3 months, but that may change to be shorter if I show improvement, plus exactly what supervision means is a bit ambiguous). Regardless of what this enables or prevents me from doing externally, I have to commit to riding the wave that is my own body, being able to handle what comes my way even-headedly from now on, and I’ve done so. The strategies to do this are as simple as they are difficult: View things in the present moment as much as possible, observe sensation and respiration when necessary, avoid perfectionistic thinking, and have compassion for all living beings.

So if you found something wrong or have a question about this story, feel free to ask or comment, but also I recommend that you take those scientific, non-sectarian strategies into account and use them in your own life, not because they are right, intellectually or morally, but because they will help you.

I also support the work of S.N. Goenka and the practice of Vipassana meditation, and plan to continue my practice of it with the approval of my psychiatrist and social worker. Remember, try not to let this story influence you if you do decide to take a course, since everyone’s experience is different, and if you do plan to practice vipasssana technique, best to get some guidance at one of these courses than to try it yourself, and do not be afraid to ask any questions.

Although a certain way of viewing the story may make it seem unremittingly negative for me (goes to a cult, goes nuts, attempts suicide, gets grounded for 3 months), it hasn’t been, rather the experience has been positive overall, with most of the negatives resulting from my own misapprehensions, overconfidences, and perfectionistic sankaras, many of which I feel these experiences have helped clear up and dissipate. Take all of this with a grain of salt, or as you will, or as you must.

I guess that’s it.

May all beings be happy.