I survived 10 days of silence

View from within my meditation cell:-)

Yes! I did it! I survived 10 days of total silence: no talking, no eye contact with the other meditators, no communication whatsoever. Wake up bell at 4 a.m. for 2 hours of meditation. Breakfast, rest. Then 3 hours of meditation. Lunchbreak. 5 hours of meditation in the afternoon. Dhammatalk in the evening (this means: watching a video and listening to Goenka’s jokes). Meditation again. Lights out at 9 p.m. The only voices we heard were those of the teachers, those of the 6 megaphones of the mosques downhill and the humming and singing of Goenka through the CD-player. And of course, our own voices inside. 

First thing I found out: JEEZ I’m a complete chatterbox. When everything around me growns silent, the voices in my head seem to multiply in presence and volume. It took me FOUR DAYS of intensive meditation to silence my mind. An unpleasant struggle. A big fight. But yes, after four days there it was… the silence. And behind this silence: ...  So finally, I found a way to master my own mind. 

Male and female strictly seperated

 Second thing I found out: when all the human voices around you are silent, you start to get aware of other ways of ‘being present’. You get aware of sounds, little gestures, movements. A little fart sounds like an elephant farting. A fork that drops on the floor sounds like churchbells in your ear. I, for instance, got irritated by a woman munching and crunching her food, while everyone else tried to be polite and silent. And yet another thing: Indonesian women of Chinese origin have the horrible habit of scraping their throats and noses every morning. The sounds these women make in the bathrooms … aaaaargh! Just makes you want to puke.

The last day of the retreat

Third thing I found out: if you spend ten days between 20 strange women, without communication, your mind starts to create personalities around their faces, their little habits, the way they walk, dress, sit, fart, snore, weep or sleep. Your mind creates ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. And what a surprise on day 10, when we all came out of silence (unwillingly, ‘cause silence grows on you, and in the end you don’t want it to stop)! Of course we didn’t match our minds’ fantasies. And after 10 minutes, all women were chatting away. Curtains were dropped, and also the men joined in.

Of course, there were many things more that I found out. But that’s private matter. Go and find out yourself. Vipassana retreats are held all over the world. Just check out their website: www.dhamma.org

To finish, a quote of Lord A. Tennyson. What he says about individuality is absolutely true!

In a letter to B.P. Blood, as quoted by William James, Lord Alfred Tennyson says:

‘A kind of waking trance –this lack of a better word- I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words –where death was an almost laughable impossibility – the loss of personality (is so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.’