Notes From Wat Chom Tong (The Vipassana Diaries)

“One would not chase after the past,
Nor place expectations on the future.
What is past is left behind.
The future is as yet unreached.
Whatever quality is present
One clearly sees right there,
Unvanquished, unshaken,
That’s how one develops the mind.

Ardently doing one’s duty today,
For — who knows? — tomorrow death may come.
There is no bargaining with Death and his mighty horde.

Whoever lives thus ardently, relentlessly
Both day and night,
Has truly had an auspicious day:
So says the Peaceful Sage.”
-“An Auspicious Day”

The mind is a terrifying battlefield.

At least, as I’ve detailed before, mine is.

My first encounter at Wat Chom Tong temple in the middle of nowhere in the northern Thai mountains — at which time I was handed my floor cot and showed to my esthetic hut the size of a jail cell — occurred with a white gentleman (a farang in Thai) named River.

People named River, I thought to myself, generally don’t come from the world of office jobs and normal suburbia.

Maybe he was a flower child, the out-of-wedlock product of some orgy back in the 70s — but, by the looks of him, definitely not.

River was no one’s hippie, I assessed.

I’ve spent time around a lot of ex-cons in my previous working life, and River looked to me a lot like one of those.

The ex-con’s all-business demeanor is similar in many ways to that of the soldier in that they both have an air of being institutionalized — molded into a shape less individualistic and more conducive to the institutional function — but, yet, not quite the same.

“Are you from Canada?” I asked, believing that I sensed an accent.

“No, they wouldn’t even let me in there,” he answered briefly.

It was then that I became nearly certain that my guess of River having spent time in the joint was correct from the start. In masturbatory celebration of my powers of discernment, I silently congratulated myself.

In keeping with the prison theme, River handed me my plain all-white uniform along with my cot.

I had come a long way to this camp for adults, not totally unlike the kind that Hillary Clinton infamously called for, stripped of any frills, but with less torture dungeons for Deplorable Irredeemables.

Yet, I had come voluntarily.

Related: Democrat Hypocrites Accuse Trump of Plotting to Throw Political Enemies in ‘Internment Camps’

The key to vipassana mediation — which means “seeing clearly” or “seeing through” in its rough translation from Pali, the language of the Buddha — is awareness and acknowledgment of all phenomena that arise through any of the six senses, which include the conventional five senses as well as “thinking,” which in that tradition is another sense.

So, sitting alone with myself for hours on end, when I let slip a gnarly bit of flatulence, as often I did, if it was audible, I was instructed to acknowledge thusly: “hearing,” then returning to the present moment. When the fragrance wafted into my nostrils, I acknowledged: “smelling,” before returning to the present moment.

Everybody loves their own brand.

You don’t run from the phenomena if it is unpleasant, and conversely you don’t cling to it if it is pleasant.

No suppressing, and no grasping.

You acknowledge, and let it go.

All things are impermanent, and the senses are not the self. The observer is the self, and it is eternal and unbreakable.

There are several Golden Rules one is meant to abide by during the Vipassana training, and at all times really, the first and most important of which being no taking of life of any sort.

This holy commandment, as it were, proved extraordinarily difficult to faithfully follow, as in Thailand pests are rampant. One evening, without thinking twice, I reflexively killed at least a dozen ants crawling around in my cup because I wanted to drink some coconut milk and they were obstructing that activity.

The creatures of the animal realm apparently didn’t get the memo banning slaughter.

The numerous stray dogs around the temple grounds reportedly kill cats for fun. On the way to the chow hall one morning, I came across a kitten laying in the path that looked like its neck had been broken.

The cats, for their part, hunted the birds. I saw one torturing some unfortunate insect on the same street as the dead kitten.

In Topeka, Kansas, I once had a cat named PuddingTits.

For fun, PuddingTits would venture into the parking lot on summer nights, catch a cicada, drag it back into my apartment, and torture it for twenty minutes or so until it finally succumbed, batting at it playfully with her nails.

Once one had finally gone limp, its life force extinguished, she’d go back to the parking lot and find another one, over and over and over until the living room was littered with insect corpses.

Wherever cats found their sadism, I don’t know. But they’re certainly unique animals in that respect.

Thus, the wheels of karma turn in perpetual passing of the buck.

The second Golden Rule is: no talking. My comrades in white robes might as well have been ghosts.

I thought of many jokes at the Buddha’s expense while on break between meditations — such as: “The Buddha did super great things, but it took Mussolini to make the trains run on time.”

But there was no one to tell.

(For more musing on the clusterfuck that is Southeast Asian train travel, see: Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile.)

I began to take note, the more I learned about Buddhism, of the many similarities between the two traditions, starting with the Golden rule of “no killing,” as well as “no lying/stealing.” Respect for one’s parents is essential to both.

The main difference is in the nature of birth/death/rebirth. Whereas Jesus descended to Earth to pay the ultimate price, thus opening the door either for eternal redemption in the Kingdom of Heaven or eternal deamination to hell after one go-around, in Buddhist philosophy, the self is born and reborn and reborn, perhaps thousands of times, until enlightenment is achieved.

Buddhism, in this way, juxtaposed to Christianity, is sort of like a criminal justice reform system: multiple — indeed, limitless — stabs until one finally gets it right and transcends into final form of nirvana, liberated from the cycle of rebirth and therefore of suffering, as life in this realm and suffering are inextricably linked.

At the end, looking back at a week that felt more like a semester, deprived of any distractions like the dumpster fire that is X, for instance, I do believe that I had begun to see the true nature of things a little more clearly.

Via Journal of Scientific Research in Medical Sciences (emphasis added):

“Vipassana seeks self transformation through self observation, where the meditator pays disciplined attention to the physical sensations that continuously interact with and condition the mind… to reduce the tendency of the mind to dwell on the past (thereby reducing regrets), or to delve into the future (thus lowering expectations and anxieties), helping the participant to remain in the ‘here and now’ and achieve relative mental tranquillity.”

Nirvana was not achieved, by any means.

But something in that direction, perhaps.

If you ever are interested in a similar experience and find yourself in Thailand, email me (benbartee@protonmail.com) and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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