The Buddhist Temple

Where I went, how I got there, and what I found.

Three years ago, while on a solo trip through northern Thailand, I stepped into a local Chiang Mai restaurant for lunch. I was pleased to see no westerners inside, a good indicator of authentic spicy thai cuisine. But as soon as I sat down and struggled to communicate with the waiter, a white man that had been hidden from my view by a column leaned over to me and asked, "do you need help ordering?" He ordered a spicy noodle dish for me in fluent thai and then began telling me his story.

He had arrived in Thailand 5 years ago from Paris, France. The reason for his relocation: to meditate. His response to my question of when he would return to France still rings clearly in my mind, "I'm not going back. My life is here now." His tone was so calm, so confident, so unfamiliar, that my curiosity began gnawing at me as it does before taking action. "What the hell has this guy seen?" I inquired further about his experience and he arranged my trip to meditate for 3 days at the buddhist temple where he originally learned. I bought all-white meditation clothes at the Chiang Mai night bazaar and boarded a songthaew the next morning, headed to the town of Chom Tong. I finished the 3 days and vowed to return in the future to finish the full 21 day course. And just this month, I did just that.

Wat Chom Tong, the main temple in the town of Chom Tong, began offering meditation courses to foreigners in 1992. The International Vipassana Meditation Center has undergone significant development since then, and now contains various dormitories, a library, and a number of meditation halls, catering to both thai and international meditators. The center is run and operated by Kuhn Thanat, who also acts as an English-speaking meditation instructor, and one of the wisest individuals I've ever met.

The temple grounds are spacious, calm, and very beautiful. The international center is tucked away in a corner of the temple grounds and has a direct path to a lake with gorgeous views of the mountains and countryside. Meditators share the grounds with buddhist monks, nuns, and temple staff. Although communication was limited during the meditation course, there were a few opportunities to briefly interact with the monks at buddhist ceremonies and chanting events. As I mentioned in a previous post, my intention in coming here was to learn meditation, not buddhism, but participating in these ceremonies added a unique cultural dimension to the experience. I'm glad I did.

The center offers a 21-day "basic" meditation course as well as 10-day retreats for experienced meditators. However, you can stay as long, or as little, as you wish. I completed the basic course and would recommend others to do so as well in order to truly grasp what the hell is going on. Believe me, your mind is in for the ride of its life. You might as well do the full course, if you can, to get the most out of the experience and your time far from home. The course is very difficult, but rewarding in greater measure. I say "greater" because the difficulty doesn't stay with you, but the lessons do.

Oh, and lastly, there is no charge for either food, lodging, or meditation instruction, but they do ask that you leave a donation. Donations provide the sole source of funding for the meditation center and the money is used to build new dormitory buildings and other infrastructure needs. As I told Thanat one day, it's very ironic that one of the most valuable life skills, learned through this practice, is taught free of charge. But then again, there would be no fairness in this world if the international meditators did not donate generously in observance of the instructors' tremendous efforts in teaching such a difficult skill.

Feel free to browse through some of the photographs I took during my stay at the temple. If you do decide to take this step, I wish you the best of luck. More information can be found here: Wat Chom Tong on Google.

The Present

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." 
Shakespeare, 16th century, England

"The mind is its own place, and can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." 

John Milton, 17th century, England

"The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it." 

Marcus Aurelius, 2nd century, Rome

"Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead, want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well." 

Epictetus, 1st century, Greece

"Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against." 

Sen-ts'an, 7th century, China

"Our life is the creation of our minds." 

Buddha, 6th century BCE, India

2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama, from India, made one of the most important psychological discoveries of recorded human history while engaging in the practice of meditation.  The discovery was so significant that it spawned an entire religion, philosophy, and way of life. Siddhartha was later named the Buddha, or "the Awakened one," by his followers. I spent nearly 3 weeks learning and practicing this same form of meditation - vipassana - in northern Thailand. Vipassana means "seeing clearly," and is also known as "Insight" or "Mindfulness" meditation.

It's difficult to summarize what I experienced. It is incomparable to anything I am familiar with, and from what I've been witnessing, anything most of us are familiar with. So of what good use are words if they cannot convey anything of value, or anything understandable, to the listener? The only true question of value in this case is, "Do I think it was worthwhile?" The answer is yes, and in fact, more worthwhile than I could have possibly imagined. It was also the most difficult thing I've ever done. But does that even matter? I can explain the experience detail by detail, but will that change you, the reader? Will that provide any lasting value other than temporarily quenching your curiosity? Surely not. So what is important to know about the meditation experience? 

Meditation makes a profound statement about happiness.

Consider the following scenario:

Over the last 50 years or so, individual income levels in most developed nations have steadily increased. We have access to an astronomically larger set of options to satisfy ourselves than we did 50 years ago. We can watch movies on demand, we can play the most advanced video games, we can shop for almost anything we can imagine, we have access to an endless source of explicit information via the internet, we can purchase nicer homes sooner than ever before, we can eat practically anything we want at almost anytime (I bet our primitive neanderthal ancestors would have been jealous), and we can travel easily and frequently. We, residents of developed nations, have access to everything we could reasonably desire. Sounds like a reason to rejoice.

But according to recent psychological studies over the last 50 years, our levels of happiness have not increased. Has anything increased? Yes: rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and consumption of Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil, etc. Please think about the significance of this phenomenon. I did not come up with this. These are recorded statistics. So what is going on?

Our traditional measuring stick for happiness is generally tied to life successes. The more we achieve, the more we acquire, the more we know, the happier we should be. But we´re not. The happiness hypothesis we share in the western world is mostly wrong. It is a grave error of common sense to think that once our basic necessities for survival are met (food and water), happiness can only be increased or maintained by striving for it. Striving to increase happiness causes tension. And even when you do reach a goal, the happiness that success produces is fleeting, temporary, because our minds are programmed (evolved) to adapt to increases or decreases in happiness and return to a common set point. A set point that seems to be, for the most part, predetermined genetically. That's why the levels of happiness reported by new lottery winners and new paraplegics is not significantly different from the other's after a year's time. Therefore:

The purpose of meditation is to help you realize that happiness doesn't lie in the past nor in the future. Lasting happiness doesn't lie in successes or positive states nor does lasting unhappiness lie in failures or negative states. Happiness lies in the present moment. In fact, it is always there.

Right now, exactly where you are, reading this post, or whatever it is you are doing in the present moment. Even if it's just sitting on the floor with your eyes closed. Even if you are simply breathing. Wherever you are, whatever your income level is, whoever you're with, happiness is there. It's present in every single moment of our lives. We have just never learned how to look. Instead we embark on a lifelong search for lasting happiness in external things and events... and never find it. So then the looming question becomes, "what the hell are we searching for?" We have everything we need right now. We all do. 

It's not out there. It's in here.

I know this is fancifully abstract, I know this sounds like new age, cotton candy, feel-good bullshit talk, I know it goes against everything we have ever known about happiness and enjoying our lives. But realize that some of the greatest thinkers in history from different parts of the world (quoted above), east and west, have all reached similar conclusions.

But even now after reading this, you can't *feel* what I'm saying. You can read and repeat these words but you can't intuitively know and feel that fear, insecurity, sadness, depression, anger, impatience, anxiety, worry, doubt, boredom, loneliness, jealousy, and even physical pain are nothing but illusions. You can´t simply decide for them not to affect you by reading or listening. It is such a foreign concept that you have to experience it for it to make any sense. It's the only way.

I'll end this post with a simple, encompassing, statement by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, professor at the University of Virginia: "Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world." Think of Neo stopping those bullets in the first Matrix.

Meditation is the path not only to observe these interpretations, but to change them. Thanks Buddha. If you had been an advocate of reciprocity, we'd all owe you one.

Lest We Forget

What else remains but our life story?

This will be a short post. It's 4 AM, my neurons aren't firing as accurately as they should, and the flight leaves soon. But this point is important.

People tell me, "you're putting in a whole lotta effort to go meditate. Shit, I'll let you meditate in my bathroom for free." Both statements are true, but the first is inconspicuously misleading. It is a lot of effort just to go meditate. It will consume a considerable amount of time, money, sacrifice, risk, discomfort, etc. If you look at my decision as practically and concretely as that, then I would have no choice but to agree with you. Please, allow me to at least lock the bathroom door from the inside so as to not be disturbed. But, as I hope to reveal through this blog, this trip is not solely about learning how to meditate. It's perhaps more importantly about building character. What character? The character I envisioned ever since I was little.. and perhaps, so did you. Huh?

What a story it will be to tell my children... not about meditation, but to say that when I was younger and overflowing with dreams, as fanciful and fantastical as they may have been, I blindly and faithfully reached out to grab them. Or at least to touch them, or graze them, even with my fingertips, if only for a second. What a story it will be to tell myself.

I hope these stories and experiences serve as a symbol of not taking life for granted. I hope they become a clear signal of the choice we all have to pursue our dreams. A choice so frequently forgotten. For in the end, what do we have left in life but our stories, our convictions, and our character?

I send out a huge wish that you may all enjoy your holidays. 

P.S. I will be unable to write any more entries for a good while. But after it's all over, I will. Till then :)