Purpose and meaning, a journey, Mr Goenka and impermanence, a lucky escape

‘The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ (Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift)

‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’ (Martin Buber (I and Thou)

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something becasue it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations for his enquiry do not strike a man at all'. (Wittgenstein)

When politicians get to the top, some seem to actually get on top of things; but others don’t; Donald Trump and Theresa May clearly don’t quite know what they are doing. They hold the position without quite being in charge. So why did they take on the job? What drove them to it? Where are they going with it? What is their purpose? What is the meaning of their own role for them? It’s a bit worrying when leaders of the free world seem to be making it up as they go along.

But then what about the rest of us? What are we doing really with our time in the world? Jinamitra (Nicolas Soames) and I have been talking about why we practice. What do we practice for? I mean, there comes a time when you may realize that you are not going to attain Enlightenment. So what’s the point of it all? J is someone who never had Enlightenment or Awakening in mind. The worldly life works well for him, but he took up Buddhism, and also initially judo, because he needed a practice, the discipline of it, to provide his mundane life with ballast, with purpose, a grounding.

To provide it with ‘a grounding in reality’, I add. But this isn’t really his perspective. He does have an intuitive sense of what is true or real or authentic – he knows when something ‘rings true’ – but his perspective on the Dharma is not really ‘cognitive’ so much as practical and emotional. And I think his is probably in the end my own position. You may not always be in touch with the depths of things, but you maybe know people who are, and you have a practice that embodies those depths directly.

I have no idea why I practice. The official Buddhist position is that you practice for the sake of Enlightenment, or for the benefit of all beings. Fair enough. And it is certainly fashionable now to set out clear ‘key performance indicators’ before you take something up. People want things to be measurable. It’s all part of the neoliberal commodification of everything. But even the Buddha’s sense of what he was trying to do was open-ended. He saw a spiritual wanderer, and he knew that this was for him too. But beyond that, he did not know, when he started, quite where he was going. The whole point of liberation is that it is inconceivable in advance.

Desire, wanting…  Sometimes you know exactly what you want – a cheeseburger, say. In Trump’s case, the presidency. But when you get what you want the wanting of course remains; it just moves on to a different object. Intention, and purpose are more integrated aspects of this propelling function of the mind, but they are similarly provisional. They give direction, without any true sense of an ultimate arrival. Often I think one is just feeling one’s way and seeing what comes to hand.

I just read a letter in a magazine for oldies (a magazine called ‘The Oldie’) from an 86 year old who writes, ‘As I get older and older, I find it increasingly difficult not to think that life is absurd. For example, I never asked to be born. I have no personal knowledge of my existence before I was born… I know that in a few years time I will return to the ‘existence’ of which I have no certain knowledge.’ And the letters editor interestingly agrees with him that life is ‘meaningless’, as if this old existentialist position was more or less incontrovertible for the kind of straightforward people who read this magazine. But it seems to me self-contradictory. It seems to me to buy into a vaguely Christian view of the meaning of life whilst at the same time rejecting it. And I think it is interesting to find this airy dismissal of the idea of meaning in life by intelligent members of that particular generation. Their inability to offer successive generations anything at all in that line means that people in our society don’t know where to look for values and meaning. What are we doing here? Islamism at least has an answer.

I am sometimes asked ‘What is the meaning of life?’ as if I were some kind of sage. I reply in different ways depending on who is asking. But I might invite the questioner to look at what is the present meaning in their own life. Everyone has meaning and purpose. It is what gets you out of bed in the morning. What confuses people is that most of us are driven by a lot of quite trivial purposes, and quite a superficial sense of meaning. It may be your football club. Your family. Your work. A love for food… They imagine, mistakenly in my view, that purpose and meaning have to be connected with something profound. I don’t think you can say that life is meaningless, only that you are not impressed by your own personal purpose and sense of meaning.

When you are young that sense of deeper meaning tends to be more exposed. For myself, when I was young I was open to Christianity even while I read Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism (everyone read Watts then). I enjoyed singing in the chapel choir at school. I visited a big Christian centre called Taize in France. And I read a lot of Jung. But I needed a practice, something to do, and Christianity did not seem to offer this. I took up ‘Transcendental Meditation’ when I was 19 or so. It was the thing to do in those days.

In 1975 I travelled overland to India on the ‘magic bus’. Again, it was standard practice for hippies of the time. Nothing very original. I had no conscious idea what my purpose was. I met a young Northern Irishman, Billy Calvert, in the ‘Pudding Shop’ in Istanbul and we travelled together through Turkey, Iran (this was before the revolution) and Afghanistan (both Iran and Afghanistan were quite liberal countries at that time – so blimey, you simply don’t know what’s around the corner). We spent a few weeks in the Flower Hotel in Kabul (run by a gay couple, one American, one Afghani) before going on through Pakistan and arriving in Delhi. We visited Dharamsala and Mcleod Ganj, which is where the Tibetans in India had made their home with the Dalai Lama.

Then we went on to Rishikesh and settled down in an ashram there. Billy and I shared a hut overlooking the Ganges. On the other side of the river was the ashram of the Maharishi, the inventor of Transcendental Meditation, and the teacher of the Beatles back in the day. It was all quite idyllic; the Ganges then was clean enough to swim in. And the ashram cost a few rupees a month. Billy left after a few months. I stayed on for about 10 months. We were taught hatha yoga, pranayama, and kundalini meditation, and the philosophy of Samkhya yoga. I think the hatha yoga was probably the most important thing for me at that time. Up till quite recently I have practiced quite regularly the hatha yoga I was taught there. Once a week I would go next door to the Sivananda ashram to listen to a swami called I think Chidananda lecture on the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (an ancient Brahminical wisdom text). I would also go over there after meditation to listen to a swami playing the sitar. We were given lunch and dinner every day, dal and chapattis, plus a little bit of vegetable (unfortunately one of the ‘retreatants’, a doctor, eventually spotted that the cook had leprosy – though clearly not a contagious form of the disease - and the cook was replaced, which was sad, as he was a decent sort). Anyway, the point I want to make is that I was open to a lot of profound meaning during this time, yet somehow there was no deeper engagement with it from me.

After this long retreat I went on to do a ten-day Vipassana retreat with a Burmese gentleman called Mr Goenka in central India. This would have been in 1976/7. So this was my first introduction to mindfulness. And of course I could not know in advance that those ten days would hold more meaning for me than the ten months I had spent in Rishikesh.

The practice introduced to me was one of becoming aware of the nature of your fundamental experience: in particular, sensation, that it is impermanent - or as Mr Goenka used to say, ‘anicca’ (pronounced ‘anicha’). This was not the only aim of the practice from his point of view though. It was also about developing equanimity, or ‘upekkha’. That is, coming across feeling in the body, and not reacting to the pleasant with craving, or the painful with aversion.

So there were basically two prongs to the attack on delusion. One cognitive, ‘anicca’, the other emotional, ‘upekkha’. However, one can also look at these two prongs as poles. The object of attention you could say is anicca. Anicca is all about the nature of your experience, the objective pole of your experience. Upekkha or equanimity represents the subjective pole of your attention, i.e. the kind of attention you bring to the object. It is about the quality of your attention to, or awareness of, your experience. And gradually these two poles come together in what is called ‘direct experience’. That vague sense we have of alienation, of looking out from ourselves at things and people ‘out there’, that sense of being fundamentally separated from the world around us, is thereby gradually softened. The sense of oneself as a separate entity is softly challenged.

The main practice I was given involved paying attention to one’s internal experience of sensation and feeling, moving sequentially through the body from one bit of the body to another. The practice is known within the modern mindfulness industry as the ‘bodyscan’. When I began the practice I found it a struggle. And then eventually something shifted, and it was as if some internal faculty just switched on. So what is going on here?

I think when we give our attention to sensation we are cultivating an experiencing of things over our predominant way of taking things in, which is to perceive or register things – and even people - as objects. This is not always easy. It is much easier to register things as objects. Your upper lip for example. You touch it, you look at it in the mirror; there it is. A thing, an object. But then there is the sense experience of the upper lip. This is something completely different. It does not have a shape. It has no clear definition. And it is not a thing at all. It is me – or a bit of me, and like every bit of me an extremely important bit of me. I would miss it dreadfully if it wasn’t there. But you can’t really grasp it, pin it down.

So when you apply attention to something you can’t pin down, the mind that grasps and separates starts to struggle. To begin with, instead of finding the sensation of the upper lip, say, we may get only perhaps an image of it; but eventually, as we persist with the practice, those objects, lips and ears and toes etc, become experience, or experiencing. It is like a different quality of attention is brought into play. It changes your experience of yourself.

As for upekkha or equanimity, it does not look emotional. But upekkha is a key aspect of metta, kindness; in fact it is the heart of kindness. Kindness is, in a sense, about not being too identified with what you want, whether for yourself or others. It’s about being cool with what happens. It means you can give people space. The development of equanimity was really for me the most difficult aspect of the practice. You had to sit still more or less all day. It was quite painful, even for someone like me who had already done quite a lot of sitting meditation. But if you persist, there comes a point where you stop struggling with the discomfort, and again there is a sort of deep shift in your whole experience of yourself. You discover that most of your suffering is mind-made.

At some point after this retreat, I made my way slowly back to England. I did not realize though that the political landscape had changed. I was taken off the train at Quetta in Pakistan and searched for drugs. I happened to have a large lump of hashish that Billy had left with me when he flew home (though I hadn’t actually smoked the stuff after Afghanistan), and by some miracle, though it was sitting there in the top pocket of my rucksack, the policeman did not look there (needless to say, I chucked it down the toilet as soon as I got back on the train). From that moment I considered myself a lucky man. And it is a perspective that persists to this day, even with my terminal cancer. I think it is just a helpful attitude to bring to things.

Back in London I got an undemanding job (in an antiquarian book shop) and at some point I had the good fortune to be mugged as I walked home late one Friday night with my wages in my pocket (I told you I was a lucky man). This would have been 1977/78. Well, I was punched in the face but I broke away from the gang and ran off as fast as I could, so I got away with just a broken nose. I say good fortune, because after that I started going to a local judo club. I had always been interested in judo, even at school: a French teacher took some classes for a couple of terms. But it took that moment of violence in the street to push me into starting again. And at this club I met Nicolas Soames. (He said later that he had never seen anyone on the judo mat as unco-ordinated as I was.) And then eventually he dragged me along to the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, ‘the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order’ in east London.

I was quite happy with the practices I had learnt from Mr Goenka, but what I found in the Triratna tradition (the FWBO as it was known then) were three things. First, community; and an emphasis on communication; second, an outward-going concern for the welfare of others; specifically, a charity they ran to support the ex-Untouchable community in India (I had seen a lot of poverty in India). This charity was an early example of what later became known as ‘engaged Buddhism’ (and it is still operating under the name Karuna). Third, it was all rather English and sort of normal - though this ‘normal English’ Buddhism was the result of a radical interpretation of the Dharma for the modern world by Triratna’s founder, Sangharakshita. But all in all I felt I could be myself. So I had found purpose and meaning to a degree, but I had done so without being driven by any real sense of purpose or even any very conscious search for meaning.

Coming back to the present, Claudia pestered the oncologist to get a head and neck scan done, and yes, I now have a tumour at the base of the brain, where there are a lot of nerves to the head, including those round my right eye, which have been damaged by the metastasis there, giving me my double vision (I get around this by blocking off the right eye), plus some intermittent sort of nerve pain. In a week I will get a petscan and a week or so after that they’ll decide whether the hormone therapy is really working, or whether to go straight onto chemo.

So now I have quite a lot of discomfort, and sometimes pain around my right eye, as well as the pain and rawness and dryness in my mouth. Food is still a grim business. I look at something nice, and automatically think, ‘That looks delicious.’ I cook it (well, you know, stick it under the grill or whatever) and think again, ‘That smells good.’ But even as that thought arises I’m thinking, ‘You deluded fool. When that food hits your mouth you’ll get enough of a taste to know what it is, but not enough to stimulate appetite. You’re not going to want it after a couple of mouthfuls.’ So I quite understand people looking at me tucking into something and saying, ‘You seem to be enjoying that.’ But I never am. And now, never mind the cancer starting up in my bones, liver and lungs, it’s going to do more horrible things to my head.

But then, I have meditation to make this all ok, isn’t that right? Mindfulness - I’ve been practicing it long enough. So how am I doing - what’s the score? Well, it is difficult for me to say. The fact is that my practice has changed my whole way of experiencing myself. This is not to make some great claim for my practice - as a meditator I’m not a naturally gifted practitioner – but if you meditate for years, if you work on the mind long enough, then the way your mind takes in your experience will inevitably be more skilled, more responsive, than it would have been otherwise. It’s like anything – if you play football regularly, your feet know instinctively how to control a ball better than if you had never played at all. You may still be relatively speaking a clumsy footballer, compared with others, but the years of practice will have an effect, a profound effect. My experience of myself is certainly painful, but generally speaking I guess my mind does not get into a state about it. At least (I want to be honest here) it may get into a state occasionally, but such a reaction is experienced as an event, or series of events within the mind. I don’t identify with them – at least not for long. So the practice changes the way the mind works, and in doing so, changes one’s relationship with one’s experience.

The mind ceases to grasp after its objects, at least for a bit. And you are giving up a fixed viewpoint. To return to the meditation practice, you may start it with a sense of yourself as having a fixed position, in the head, say, but eventually you find that you are just as much in your right toe. Now this is just sensation. It’s when this process extends to the other senses, hearing and even sight, that it becomes quite interesting. Maybe we are not actually confined to our bodies. Maybe our experience of ourselves can extend wherever our senses bring us our experience. The point is that paying attention to sensation has this quite radical effect on the quality of our attention – it forces the mind to open up, to become receptive. It does this partly because it frustrates the controlling, objectifying aspect of the mind, which simply can’t get a foothold on things in this world of sensation. There is, in a sense, nothing there.

As for equanimity - how’s that going? Well, in my own present case, not always that great. What happens is that I start to close down around my new affliction. I turn in on myself. It is not part of who I am. I am no longer able to relate to the world from an experience of myself that I can accept. I’ve come to accept, more or less, that who I am now includes incurable cancer and the horrible side effects of my treatment. But it takes me time to accept any new development of my condition as part of the furniture of my experience of myself, and to live with it, and turn out to the world again from it. So it is an education in impermanence, especially of the self. Each new lurch into some fresh horror reintroduces me to who I am.