After years of reading about meditation, I finally started practicing a form of meditation in 1996 on my weekly 2.5 hours commute each way to visit my then-girlfriend in Washington State. The practice that I followed was of my own invention, but of course I later discovered that it had been a classic meditation practice for a long time. You rarely get to invent anything new in a field that is several thousands of years old. My practice was to watch for the gaps between the thoughts and being aware of what kind of awareness was present during those times. I noticed that it is possible to watch a thought stir and arise, like steam bubbles rising from a pot of water about to boil. You know that a thought is about to happen, just like you can feel a sneeze coming, but you don’t know yet consciously what the thought is about. Then the conceptual thought arises, and a very short time after that it gets translated into words. I learned that you can short-circuit the process at any point. I played games; how long could I go without a thought? How many thoughts can I have if I don’t let them get translated into the slower inner speech? Eventually I incorporated the more classical mindfulness of breath into my meditation. I found that it provides a secure anchor to the present, to a body process, accessible at all times, even walking down the street.
An insight that comes quite early on when we start to meditate is to notice that there is a gap between the perception of a stimuli and our reaction to it. Freedom of choice resides in that gap. We can choose to let the usual conditioned response patterns unfold, or we can short-circuit them and select a wiser, more loving or compassionate response.
For example, one day when I was driving from Vancouver to Seattle, I got caught in a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the day. My reaction was the usual frustration and anger. Once the anger finally died down it dawned on me that I had only been stressing myself out. The anger had no effect whatsoever on the time I spent caught in traffic but had raised my blood pressure, cortisol level, and other harmful stress markers. Was there an alternative? Why not set the intention to rejoice at traffic jams in the future, as they provided me with extra meditation time? And it worked! I have never felt frustrated by traffic jams since. That was my first realization of the power of the practice at changing one’s life for the better, toward inner peace.
Up to that point I was rather preoccupied with the prospect of being dead, which filled me with dread. In 1998 I read something by Alan Watts that assuaged that feeling. He made the point that most people don’t mind not having existed before their birth. We just didn’t exist then and that is not seen as a problem. Similarly, he said, we should not mind not existing after our death. The symmetry of the argument had a strong impact on my physicist’s mind. It seems entirely reasonable to me, and the feeling of dread at the thought of not existing in the future dropped away for good.
Sometime in 2000 or 2001 a friend of mine gave me a batch of “magic” cookies that he had baked using marijuana oil. I had never tried pot before but had read (e.g. “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley) that it could offer spiritual breakthroughs to the prepared mind. Alan Watts had even offered that, of all the drugs that he had experimented with, marijuana can produce experiences that are the closest to enlightenment. So, I had one cookie for dessert one evening, and failing to notice anything different after a few minutes, took another one, then another. As you can guess, that was not a good idea. The effect was slow to produce and built over a period of a few hours but was overwhelming.
I knew that the effect had taken hold when, listening in bed to the song “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan, I felt an angel lift me off the bed gently by my shoulders, his wings folding over my body, enveloping me as I drifted upward.
I discovered that I could summon any experience that I wished for. So, I decided that I would like to know what it was like to be Brahman, the Hindu ultimate reality. My bed turned into a grid that extended to all atoms in the universe, and I fused and spread into it. I enjoyed that all-powerful, all-knowing state for a while, but eventually decided that being God was a lot of responsibility, so decided that I would like to meet the Judaeo-Christian God instead. At once I felt Him to be six inches to the left of my head and I felt enveloped in His unconditional love. It was the loveliest feeling I could ever remember having at that time. Everything would be OK, there was nothing to fear, and I was completely accepted as I was. I enjoyed that feeling as long as I could even though I don’t believe in the existence of a personal God.
Then, the true meaning behind everything was revealed to me. I was absolutely awed at the depth of it and could not understand why I had not figured it out before. All trace of skepticism had vanished. I totally believed that that newfound “truth” was actually the meaning of the universe. But then it was revealed that behind that truth was an even deeper one that underlaid it! I was shocked and amazed at the depth of that even deeper truth and marvelled at the discovery. Then another even deeper truth underlying those two was also revealed to me, and so on, faster and faster, deeper and deeper. My body started convulsing from the effect of the drug, and I thought that maybe this was not marijuana after all, because I didn’t think that it could produce such hallucinations or make you convulse, that something much stronger must have been laced into it, and that I might die of an overdose, but I didn’t mind one bit because I had been able to experience this, to know these deep “truths” before I die.
Eventually the effect of the drug started to wear off. The revelations started to slip away like sand through fingers as I desperately clutched after them. I knew that I would go back to my ordinary mind, that I would forget all these truths because an ordinary mind could not possibly comprehend them. I was right. Afterwards, I had no idea what the content of these revelations was. My belief now is that there never was any content to them. The drug activated the “meaning centres” in the brain. I was getting the message “This is supremely important and meaningful!”, but there was nothing to remember, just the impression that something was important.
The main lesson I retained out of that whole experience is that the brain can be fooled, even that of someone as skeptical as I am. Feeling that something is true and real does not make it so. The feeling is real, but what it refers to is not necessarily so. When I hear that some mystic has experienced a deeper truth and knows it to be real, I remain skeptical. I have experienced it myself and it still didn’t convince me once I sobered up.
Another lesson is that being enveloped in unconditional love and acceptance is a great way to practice metta, or loving-kindness.
In 2000 a colleague from work, Jeanne Robinson, invited me to attend a non-residential weekend Zen retreat taught by her teacher, Reb Anderson. That was my first exposure to structured meditation. I had to sit for about forty minutes just staring at a spot on the floor five feet ahead of me. I got fascinated with the fading in and out of vision as the retina’s photoreceptors were deprived of the constant changes in brightness that they depend on to generate an image. I thought that the slow walking periods were funny, but I balked at the flat-on-your-face prostrations in front of the Buddha statue. The attendant priests, and especially the Roshi (teacher), were very impressive in their traditional Zen robes. A bit intimidating, actually. The Dharma1 talks were about self-compassion, a subject that was new to me.
After the retreat ended Jeanne asked me what I thought of it. I told her that it was okay, but I didn’t like all the rituals because it reminded me too much of my catholic upbringing. “That’s funny,” she replied, “I like Zen precisely because it reminds me of my catholic upbringing! But if that does not work for you, you should try the vipassana2 folks. In East Asia, where Theravada Buddhism is practiced, they are even more ritual-heavy than Zen. But the Westerners who brought it to the West largely dropped the rituals and mostly sit around in chairs in their street clothes.”
So, I started going to weekend retreats organized at that time by the Westcoast Dharma Society. Taught by full-time lay teachers who were flown in from out-of-town, these short retreats are a great way to find a teacher that you resonate with. I was hooked.
On New Year’s Day 2002 I made a resolution to sit daily. I have held it since with very few exceptions. This is a very big step in one’s practice. Progress, which had been slow and uneven, became steady and rapid. I started with 20 to 30 minutes daily, then 1 hour daily by the end of the year. Since 2004 I have kept to between 2-5 hours daily, including walking meditation. It is one of the most pleasant things that I do, not something I do because I know it is good for me, but for its own sake.
In early 2004 I attended a weekend non-residential retreat taught by Leigh Brasington. I really liked Leigh’s no-nonsense approach as he teaches directly from the traditional Pali suttas, a method he follows from his teacher, Ayya Khema. He also eschews talks about supernatural concepts, preferring more secular interpretations of concepts such as karma and rebirth (e.g. we are reborn from moment to moment). Following Ayya Khema, Leigh teaches medium-depth absorptions, called jhanas in the Pali Nikaya suttas. This is opposed to much deeper jhanas described in the Pali commentaries. The issue of what depth of concentration is necessary to reach to call it a jhana is a subject of deep controversy in Buddhist circles3. My personal experience was that the jhanas taught by Leigh are sufficient for spiritual awakenings and much easier to access than the full absorptions.
After that weekend retreat, I wanted to attend one of Leigh’s 10-day retreats, but I required more retreat experience.
I next attended a five-day residential vipassana retreat, held in beautiful surroundings on the edge of a lake in Nanaimo, BC. I had brought a book about Vedenta4 to read at night. I think that that reading, coupled with more concentrated meditation than I had ever done before, contributed to produce a first awakening of the nondual kind that lasted for a couple of days. My sense of self had momentarily expanded to include all that I perceived, and I felt love for everything. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. The next day as I woke up my first thought was “What a load of crap that was!” In retrospect that was too harsh a response to the loss of the nondual vision. It was a glimpse of things to come. Awakenings are often transient, happening more and more often, lasting longer and longer, until one is established permanently at that new level, before proceeding to the next level, or kind, of enlightenment.
During that retreat I started walking barefoot on the wood chip trail that surrounded the lake. I figured that it would help maintain mindfulness of the sensations of walking. I kept that practice while hiking for the next several years. I got lots of funny looks on the hiking trails!