“You’re going to suffer. You won’t be able to sleep. The worst demons of your life are going to go through your mind,”
(Tomorrow: Day One. Introspection begins. I ache all over. I can’t move.)
Can you see reality as it is?
And if so, how will it be?
That’s what we’ve been told over and over again. Vipassana is a meditation technique attributed to Gautama Buddha that seeks to take you through three steps to a state of wisdom that allows you to see the purest reality of your consciousness. Without mirages, recognizing the impermanence of everything that we are and that surrounds us.
In this ten-day retreat that I took recently, they explained to us that Vipassana meditation was the contribution that the Buddha inherited to humanity. They insisted on the proposal of their main broadcaster S.N. Goenka, that there is a misconception of Gautama Buddha. He would have rejected the worship of him or of any divinity. He believed that he could be a guide but he instilled that wisdom and divinity is in every human being.
For this he proposed three codes that will lead you to that: sīla (ethical precepts), samādhi (self-knowledge) and paññā (wisdom).
I had always been interested in taking a ten-day Vipassana course.
It is a challenge. It demands everything from you: effort, perseverance, masochism, indulgence and everything you can imagine.
It consists of ten days.
In each of them you get up at 4 in the morning and go to sleep at 9:30 p.m.
Between those hours you have the obligation to meditate ten hours. You eat two meals (6:30am and 11:00am) and fast until the next day. You do not have access to a phone or electronic device, books or notebooks.
This was a real slap in the face of what we call modernity.
You live only with you.
With your gods and your demons.
THE ARRIVAL
To get there, we had to travel to the Mexican mountains. The place, a beautiful place, surrounded by trees and vast vegetation. We were around 60 people. Thirty men and thirty women. Earlier that morning, my experience had begun with two of my companions. A lawyer who had gone around the world to every spiritual retreat he could find in search of the BIG QUESTION. And a French woman involved in the movie industry, who had come exclusively to the retreat to quiet the noise in her mind.
Almost all of us arrived that day with questioning looks, it seemed that we were saying: who will this be? What will he come for? What will he do? Will he be depressed he? Is he a fake?
As the introductory talk began, we all wandered through the spacious gardens. We continued to exchange glances but few conversations were generated.
Perhaps my work as a journalist helped me.
I caught sight of a man who I later learned was Russian. We talk. He was there because he had come to Mexico to avoid being drafted into his country’s war with the Ukraine. He was a computer scientist and he told me that the world was approaching a catastrophe due to the avalache that is coming due to Artificial Intelligence.
Then I ran into a very tall, very skinny and muscular guy. He was doing some kung-fu moves. It was his fourth withdrawal. His profession? Travel the world. He was Israeli, so I joked that he was probably a Mossad agent. He looked at me very seriously and he told me that maybe I wouldn’t hold the course. “You’re going to suffer. You won’t be able to sleep. The worst demons of your life are going to go through your mind,” he said.
A young man in his thirties followed. It was his ninth grade. He returned because he had lost the meaning of his life.
Then the introductory talk began. Women on one side. Men for another. They served a lite dinner and at the end they informed us that the code of silence was beginning. We would not be able to speak for another ten days. They wished us luck. We went to our cells, which consisted of a bunk, a small table, and a small closet. It was 8.30 p.m. I felt helpless. Vulnerable. I had nothing to read. I imagined how prisoners who spend long sentences in jails feel. I closed my eyes.
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