Vipassana Vault: Day 8
Context
After more than a week spent mulling over the experience, losing the plot at times, forgetting everything I learned and felt, and being swept back up into the real world, I finally have set aside time to reflect—in writing—upon my 10-day Vipassana retreat in Kyoto, Japan. I tried my best to keep a mind palace throughout the ten silent days (plus the two additional days as well). Mercifully, I dumped everything into a series of voice memos on the train back to Ōsaka, which has allowed me to let go a little bit over the past week, knowing that my in-the-moment thoughts are there to return to.
In short, a mind palace refers to the mnemonic technique of mentally placing information in specific locations along a familiar route or space. For me, I chose my bedroom growing up, with each day being allocated a particular section within it. To recall the information, you simply take a mental walk through that space and pick up what you left there. It leverages the strong spatial and visual memory of the brain to encode otherwise abstract or hard-to-remember information. I tried my best to make up little stories and objects scenes that would stick in my mind more easily.
Hence, I’d originally titled this series Inside the Mind Palace of a Mad Man, but that felt too complicated in hindsight, and kind of misses the major detail about these reflections in that they relate to a Vipassana course. So, the Vipassana Vault it is instead.
Over the next ten days, I’ll share my Vipassana adventure with you through this mind palace lens, hopefully offering a light-hearted spin on the whole journey and using it as a gateway to dive deeper into what I felt. Ultimately, this is both an exercise for myself in aiding my own digestion and processing of the retreat, but also a medium to share everything I experienced with others.
I should clarify: each day from one to nine was essentially the exact same, in terms of schedule. You can hopefully find a simple snapshot here. Whilst the minutiae of how I exactly used these chunks of time varied from day to day, the overall gist was unchanged. These mind palace reflections, therefore, intend to highlight mainly just the moments or thoughts that stood out to me, rather than attempting to capture every detail in a running commentary fashion.
Day 8
Once again, it has been a very long hiatus for me from this series. Already, the end of April looms. I sit on a high-speed train from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. There are many other ways that I could—and perhaps, should—be occupying my time right now, but returning here is important to me. Other tasks I can complete in a semi-distracted environment, but I’d struggle with this.
China has been fascinating. I’ve really enjoyed the variety weaved in throughout our stay here. I feel like ending in Shenzhen will offer a thought-provoking end to a diverse trip. Equally, I’m excited for Thailand and hopefully the change of pace and scenery that it will offer. I already know that we’ll be yearning for the seamless luxuries of China the moment we leave, and that I take it all for granted right now. Maybe, but then again, I can acknowledge that right now, so do I really take it for granted?
Anyway, where were we?
Update—started this in China; finishing it just now in Thailand, about a month later…
Song of the Day
This is the Last Time by The National
“Jenny, I am in trouble. Can’t get these thoughts out of me. Jenny, I’m seeing double. I know this changes everything…”
I love this song. The full thing, but particularly the unexpected ending which features the above lyrics. In fact, I treasure this whole album. The close-to-monotone vocal delivery just seems to scratch an itch for me. Tracks like Don’t Swallow the Cap and Pink Rabbits are favourites of mine, too. The album has a kind of plasticity wherein I feel I can let the full thing play without skips, in just about any mood, and it will mould to suit the vibe.
But yes, by this point, I did feel in some trouble. There were times I started doubting my sanity. I couldn’t get thoughts out of me. I felt I was in too deep now. Insight actually was a little uncomfortable. I wanted to suture the wound I’d opened and just leave it be. Let myself come back to oblivious ignorance. Less of the existentialism. I felt I was seeing double because the internal deep dives that played out during meditation by this stage were contrasted with violent snaps back to reality. Home. People. Places. The whole experience started feeling like a fever dream.
At the same time, though, this song has a comforting, reassuring tone. At least, to me it does. I knew the end was near. I felt more in control of my meditation than ever, but, at the same time, out-of-control in a polarising, volatile way. I was living through calm chaos, and that’s what this song represents for me, I think.
Day 8 was a crazy one. For the most part, the day-to-day happenings I’d become accustomed to repeated themselves here. One experience stood out though. I’d like to discuss it here.
In the sitting before the lunch break, I was pulled into what I can best describe as a hallucinatory experience almost immediately after hitting the cushion. The initial, droning chants started, but I could hardly hear them after a few seconds. Everything physical kind of dissolved around me, moving into the background.
It was almost like entering into REM sleep, except during a waking state. I had the sensation of an autonomous blinking behind my closed eyelids. Lightness washed over my body. There was weightlessness all over, as if I was gently floating on buoyant water. It felt as though my head was hovering above my body. Then, I began to visualise that happening.
A floating imagery flooded my mind. My perspective of observation shifted from my own eyes to something external. I could see myself, sitting there on the cushion, still. My body remained a statue, but my conscious mind drifted away towards the ceiling like a helium balloon. I was looking down on myself.
For a moment, this visualisation stayed within the confines of the meditation hall. I stopped once I hit the ceiling, if that makes any sense (of course, none of this makes much sense). This third-person perspective was funky, but not insane. After all, I was still observing reality as it was, just from a different angle. Then things became weirder.
I suddenly zoomed out rapidly, in a time-lapse fashion. My body, and the room I was in, became no more than a speck. I was now looking down at the entire Earth in a spinning-blue-and-green-globe kind of way. It felt laughably stupid in one sense. It was almost like I was trying to construct the image symbolic to many short videos, where something seemingly significant occurs, only for a sped up animation to play where the video zooms out to space to show how small the Earth is with respect to everything. That would have been funny and somewhat cliché, but in this case, I felt real fear, because I couldn’t control anything.
It felt markedly different from the countless times my mind had wandered off to visualise or think about something else, only for me to gently tug on the leash and bring it back to the present. This time, it was long gone. Throughout it all, I was still conscious of the floor underneath me and my surroundings. I felt my heartbeat and my breath clearly. They hadn’t sped up from what I could glean.
Was it merely a fabrication of my mind, trying to fit a narrative over the teachings I was supposed to believe; the truths that were supposed to reveal themselves—confirmation bias in a way? Did I really slip into some kind of out-of-body experience? It’s definitely the closest thing I have ever felt to it. Or, was I just becoming a little insane and delusional by this point? Perhaps the most likely, or at least, a part of the puzzle.
It does sound made up, though. Just as the discourse mentions to uncovering wisdom about reality via meditation by actually experiencing it, not just hearing or reading about it, or understanding it intellectually—that, of course, is the convenient time when the truths of insignificance suddenly manifest themselves through some vision…
It all seems a bit scripted. But then again, who actually knows how the mind operates? I certainly don’t. Was this a “revelation” about observing the complete insignificance of my body, and its web of vibrating particles among the sea of other vibrating particles that make up the entire Earth? Or just some strange dream riffing off these concepts that I was trying to process in my head at the time? I don’t know. But it was scary, and perhaps insightful? I struggle to place the truth of it all.
What I can be sure of, though, was that this turned out to be the easiest sitting I’ve completed by a mile. The one hour passed by in an absolute blur, without any struggle, or pain, whatsoever. At a certain point, my body felt like it started “humming” at a certain frequency, so to speak. Swaying—in tiny, subtle movements—rhythmically. Throughout the whole retreat, I’d say this was the only time I felt a true dissolution of all overt sensations in the body. Only these pleasant, subtle vibrations were there.
Ultimately, it was definitely an experience. I don’t what adjective to place there. It was scary, certainly. Was it eye-opening? Maybe. Was it the deepest immersion I’ve ever felt during mediation? I’d say so. Hard to place, but absolutely worth bookmarking.
