Silent Retreat Day three

Monday October 8th 2007

Gaia House, nr Newton Abbot, Devon

Five day Silent Meditation Retreat - Day three . . . . .

I had a new sleeping plan for last night. I would go to bed as soon as we finished and aim to be asleep before the snorer arrived. Then, if I woke up at any point prior to 2:00am, I would get up and find somewhere else to sleep - the yoga room seemed a possibility as it had beds in it, or possibly the lounge downstairs.

I was awake at just past 11:00! My second roomie gets up to go to the loo and I depart while he is away. I settle on the yoga room, though it turns out the beds are stacked on top of one another and that they slope slightly as a result. I settle in one at the far end, hoping that the retreat does not contain anyone who likes to do yoga in the middle of the night. In theory my bellringing duties will ensure I am up before any early morning yogis. I avoid rolling over and falling out of bed due to the slope.

So I do get a decent night's sleep and feel tons better today. I even do a short 20 minute yoga sequence after bellringing and pre-Qi Gong. I am joined briefly by a woman who does one of the fastest sun salutations I have ever seen. To continue the sense of re-vitalisation, I have four spoonfuls of sugar in my porridge, but I do manage to restrict myself to the half banana we are allowed.

So it is with a much better outlook that I set out today on our meditation journey. But Dharma instruction focuses on some of the questions that I thought I might look into for my yoga course elective. Prompted by Catherine's talk, I am beginning to remember some things from my reading of the classic scriptures of Buddhism years ago. For instance, when she mentions the quote from the Buddha that his monks are radiant because they "do not regret the past nor brood over the future. They live in the present" I remember that this is from the first book of the Sam Yutta Nikaya - part of the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures. Other distant memories of reading classical Buddhist texts begin to resurface during the day.

And so began, for me, a whole flow of connected thoughts linking much of my reading of the last 25 years. I rarely have such surges of flowing ideas and I found myself really excited by them during the long morning sitting. Of course, restlessness is one of the five hinderances identified as obstacles to Insight Meditation - and I was certainly restless. But here are my thoughts . . .

We yoga students continually refer back to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. This sets the postures of yoga into an eight-fold path, where it is quite clear that the aim of these postures is to prepare the body for the practice of meditation. This leads on to the later stages of the yogic path into the state of union of the individual self with the Eternal Self. The word "Yoga" means "union" of course. So the famous scene in the Bhagavad Gita written centuries before Patanjali where Krishna gives Arjuna a glimpse of this union shows why the Gita uses the word Yoga without mentioning any postures!

But the classical Vedas also set out a path for life - a model that I find great sympathy for. A person is firstly a child, then a student, then a householder. The householder stage is the main engagement with the outside world - careers, marriage, your own children, etc. But later, there are further stages where the outside world is renounced and a person may throw off their worldly ties to pursue their spiritual life - the so-called "forest dwelling" stage. So the postures of yoga are practiced through the householder stage to enable the body to practice the austerities of meditation required for the later stages.

The Buddha rejected the classical Vedic model and argued that there was no Eternal Self with which the individual self could be in union. Instead he argued that the real ultimate reality was the ever changing world of impermanence. The practice of meditation would enable practitioners to understand this ultimate reality and see that it is the source of the suffering that affects the world and everyone in it (the First Noble Truth).

Now here is a key point it seems to me. Classical Vedic scriptures place the activity of meditation towards the end of life while the Buddha's First Noble Truth can apply to every second of everyone's life. So Buddhist meditation can be applied to anyone at anytime. This is why, when Eastern philosophies start to come to the West, people were drawn to Buddhist meditation throughout their lives while Yoga remains, in effect, solely an exercise programme.

I also seem to remember that certain Buddhist texts refer to various yogic meditators - the ascetics with whome the Buddha lived prior to his awakening. These text provide more detail on yoga meditation from which the Buddha drew heavily for his own teachings in Insight Meditation, even though the Buddha rejected the ultimate goal of yogic meditation. If I could just remember where these discussions are . . .

So if I add to this some material about the history of how Buddhism and Yoga have each penetrated into the West, I will have my elective thesis.

And all of this springs up virtually fully formed during this morning's sitting.

Following this we have a 75 minute session of Qi Gong - lots of arm circling and quite a bit of aching afterwards. Then it is lunch - brown pasta with tofu and tomato sauce which is really nice and which I wish I had had more of.

Post lunch I went for a walk out past the church next to Gaia House and along a public footpath across the local farmland. It is amazingly quiet - just the birds, sheep and cows, some geese somewhere. Virtually no sound of vehicles. I also went on a short trip round the grounds of Gaia House itself, found the vegetable patch at the back, saw the very tame rabbits in the back garden and made my way up through the trees to the stone stupa covered in prayer flags and the small pergoda at the top end. This is certainly a fantastic location.

The huge activity in my mind keeps rattling along through the afternoon and I think of a number of relevant examples to go through in my elective paper. I gradually lose energy as the afternoon progresses and my back and shoulders ache more and more from this morning's Qi Gong. For our last meditation session of the afternoon, we are on our own in the hall while Catherine and Brad have group sessions. For some reason I find this much more relaxing and I am able to focus better on my sitting.

Supper is leak and potato soup - odd how I have really enjoyed the simple veggie diet so far - and a far cry from the plans we have for food at WBB.

The post-supper Qi Gong session is truly awful - four postures, very little movement. I am constantly waiting for it to get going but nothing happens. When it is finally over, Brad gives us the Dharma talk for the evening and it turns out that the Qi Gong we did was a build up for his talk, which is about boredom! He asks us how many times we have read the material on the notice boards (twice for me), how many times we have looked to see if there is a message for us and whether we feel sad when there isn't. All very perceptive points. He reads us some poems by a Sufi mystic (not Rumi). The upshot is that I feel a bit bad about all my writing and thinking about my elective. But on the other hand, it has been an exciting period of thought.

So for me, the loss of external stimulation has led to a flurry of creative thought rather than boredom.

I do my walking meditation outside again tonight and spend most of it stationary with my head looking upwards at the Milky Way around Cygnus. As my eyes become accustomed to the darkness, the level of detail I can see is amazing.

The last meditation session of the day remains painful and I have resolved to consume lots of painkillers from now on, now I have remembered where the first aid cupboard is.

To bed slightly earlier at 9:15 and the same plan as last night if I wake up early.