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5 Months On Silent Retreat
May 19, 2009 by Ray Baskerville
Jay Michaelson has been a law professor, magazine editor, and the director of national nonprofit organization. A student Yale Law School, founder of a successful dot-com software company, and author of three books. Last year, he decided to spend five months on silent meditation retreat, mostly in Nepal……..
"What, my friends have asked (at least the ones who didn’t think I’d lost my mind), is it like to spend five months without talking, writing, or even updating my facebook status? Short answer: not what you’d expect, but more powerful.
First of all, not talking is the easy part. You don’t go crazy, and you don’t forget how to speak. (The silence was never absolute, either; I had a ten-minute interview with my teacher every day.) There’s just not that much to say anyway, when all you’re doing is sitting and walking, and noticing the moment-to-moment sensations of whatever is going on. Eventually, the silence becomes second nature — even for someone like me.
Much harder than not talking, though, is not thinking. In the form of Buddhist meditation I practiced, vipassana, or "insight," meditation, the objective is neither to indulge thought nor to suppress it, but simply to let it be, along with everything else. Thoughts arise, thoughts pass, and the job of the meditator is just to notice them and move on. In this way, it’s possible to gradually unlearn the habitual tendency to grab onto pleasant perceptions, thoughts, and feelings and push away bad ones. The Buddha, my teachers, and I have found that some measure of liberation eventually results.
Easier said than done, of course. In practice, it’s just about impossible to stop thinking. This, itself, is an important lesson: that the mind is not under our control. Nor does it naturally stay on lofty topics like the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I often daydreamed of utterly meaningless drivel — I must’ve rehashed the plots of the Star Wars saga a hundred times over the five months of retreat, for reasons which still escape me. (I think it had something to do with meditation training being a lot like Jedi training, but who knows.) All this without any intention from me.
It’s at this point in the story that most of my friends usually roll their eyes and say that the whole thing sounds crazy. However, having emerged from five months of silence, I can safely say that it was among the sanest things I’ve ever done. Not the easiest, to be sure, but infinitely more balanced, awake, and instructive than the chatter-filled world I live in most of the time.
Eventually, you see, the noise really did subside, and the mind started to relax. This is the trick: that in meditation, every goal is achieved by giving up on it. The more force one applies, the more resistance arises in response. On the other hand, the more letting-go, the more letting-be — the more peacefulness, clarity, and awareness.
Once again, this is easier said than done, because for several billion years, we’ve evolved the basic instinct to hold onto the pleasant and push away the unpleasant. If we didn’t do this, we wouldn’t eat, run away from predators, fight when necessary, or reproduce. Natural selection does not favor Buddhism. So while "letting go" may sound pleasant and relaxing, it runs against aeons of biological conditioning."
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Very interesting experience it must be. But it also must be an awfully difficult job with yourself and without internet.