by Lei Wang
The first meditation retreat I ever went to was also the worst one, at least circumstantially. A new meditation center was in the process of being built and in the meantime, we were in a series of concrete boxes with tiny fortress windows, fluorescent lights, and corrugated tin roofs with the nails showing. This fit with the original purpose of meditation (the whole point of meditation is to triumph over circumstances with attitude), though not the modern spiritually materialist one. Reluctant renunciates of luxury, we lay on our thin mattresses in our metal bunks, eight to a room, staring at the nails in the ceiling; we ate on benches outside in the summer tropical island humidity, out of tin bowls with tin chopsticks that we washed ourselves. The meditation hall with its industrial blue foam puzzle mat floor and air conditioning was the nicest environment around, which made meditation more appealing. I avoided going to the separate, mold-grown outhouse whenever possible.
I learned years later that there is a practice in Tibetan Buddhism that specifically trains the disgust response: by eating increasingly stranger and stranger foods to you, and reacting calmly, even neutrally, you rewire this evolutionary reaction. (This is also one of the secrets behind cold showers, which I appreciate theoretically: one’s nervous system is meant to greet the cold ever more gently instead of tensing up, which then applies to other things.) So potentially even a miasmic outhouse can become, through training, if not desirable, at least not actively repulsive. Though ask even a well-trained monk what he would truly prefer and you’d be hard-pressed to find one who wouldn’t want a nice hotel room with accompanying restaurant and hot tub over a shanty and gruel.
Meditators are not supposed to care about these things, but of course we do. We are still mammals after all, as my therapist likes to remind me whenever I feel guilty about wanting love and good food and coziness. Worse: we are mammals with minds! In subsequent meditation retreats, the conditions were better, but the materialism was still there because the mind with its meaning-making was (and me with my bad attitude). Then it became about who got the slightly better bed or room, who brought the extra seasoning cleverly hidden in a miniature vitamins bottle (this really happened, and I really was jealous). Not that I didn’t squirrel in my own illicit snacks amidst austerity: a sleeve of chocolate digestive biscuits that I hid amongst my bathing essentials and ate in the shower stall.
My first meditation retreat, in Asia, was very heavy on following rules; there would be people checking to make sure you weren’t napping when you were supposed to be meditating, so some healthy fear was instilled. (A wise rule-following fellow meditator told me: “How rare in this age, to experience deprivation.”) But in America, things were more lax and I became more intransigent: in addition to electronics, reading and writing were not allowed, but I managed to sneak in a notebook and pen in the lining of my suitcase and write in the in-between times: 4am before the gong rang for the first meditation, lunchtime, 930pm after everyone had gone to sleep, under the covers just in case anyone could spy from the windows. (Now I’m afraid the meditation police will find this post and I will be banned.) I keep writing about this experience because it keeps astonishing me: how writing became delicious when it was forbidden. The best religion in the world should really take this into account.
In Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s YouTube Pizza Meditation, he exhorts his listeners: you can do anything during this meditation, as long as you don’t think of pizza. Of course pizza is the only thing you can then think about, like white bears or pink elephants or sex for unmarried Catholics in love. What if it were frowned upon for us to love our parents or our spouses or even God, instead of the thing we are supposed to do? (What if a religion banned sex after marriage in favor of spiritual union only—how hot would the marital bed become?) The relationship therapist Esther Perel postulates that at least one reason lost spouses fall into affairs is because, since there are such heavy consequences for being discovered, the affair feels like the first thing in a long time they are completely sure of wanting. After all, if you want what you are sanctioned to want, is the desire really coming from you or are you just being a good sheep? But is that just wanting what we all want, that is, what we can’t have?
One could imagine a religion going too far with reverse psychology: if murder became morally righteous, as with martyrs, though you still don’t see a whole lot of martyrs, considering. Some things (survival) are too evolutionarily ingrained. Yet according to the journalist Scott Carney in his book, The Enlightenment Trap, when the Buddha first started teaching meditation, he accidentally killed a bunch of people. Buddha had all the best intentions, but he was still learning. He emphasized the impermanence aspect of Buddhism: monks were meant to go to the charnel grounds out of town where corpses were left rotting and festering and meditate on how they were only bags of bones, sacks of meat. After giving these instructions, the Buddha went into a cave for a personal three-month retreat. His followers took his words too literally: if detachment was the goal, wasn’t the ultimate detachment death? Dr. Deaths appeared on the scene to help people kill themselves, a spiritual euthanasia. When Buddha finally reappeared, he realized he needed to start teaching meditation differently, and so he introduced the focus on the breath: a method that required a living body. That was the real point anyway of the corpse meditations: embodied experience.
An artist once told me the best life lesson he had ever received was in a single history class in high school. One day, the teacher asked the class to meet in an auditorium with a lectern instead of their typical room. As usual, the teacher called on people for their responses to the readings, but his praise was unusual: it seemed random, to have nothing to do with the quality of responses. He was downright rude to some students. The class eventually figured out that depending on where your name was in the alphabet, the teacher would either give you special treatment or ostracize you, to demonstrate how arbitrary such distractions were, and yet of course how it applied to their chapter on World War II. The person who told me this story was the one who discovered the pattern. He was in the half of the alphabet that was ostracized; would he not have found the pattern if he were in the well-treated half?
The worst regimes in the world always have some kind of common enemy, an enemy that is also often an in-group, against whom the people can gather, and often this seems both encoded and arbitrary. Though he didn’t believe in an uneven meritocracy, this same unlucky alphabetical person believed in a hierarchy of souls. The wisdom traditions almost invariably teach some version of this, that there are saints and sinners, more evolved and less evolved souls, though they don’t always go as far as to say better or worse ones. Predictably (obviously), the souls that look to violence and anger to solve problems are less evolved and their evolution involves discovering more enlightened solutions. But something about this hierachy doesn’t sit right with me: as if we had just moved human politics onto a celestial level, like the Greeks with their flawed and lustful gods.
I keep thinking about the consortium of souls in Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, a channeled work which may or may not be true: I consider them speculative truths. But the feeling of truth is what I’m after. In one particular soul conference, which apparently happens between lifetimes as souls decide what they want to learn for their next lives, a soul there decides it wants to learn the lesson of forgiveness. Another soul then volunteers to be the one to teach that soul the lesson: by doing something unforgivable to them. Who is the more evolved soul here: the one learning to forgive or the one helping someone else learn how to forgive?
The best religion in the world would not have a hierarchy: is a frog really less enlightened than a monkey, to the universe? Where do mountains fall, in relation to rocks? It is minds that make categories, evolved or unevolved, enlightened or unenlightened.
The problem with the classic depiction of karma is that it is your fault you are a worm, and what determines anyway if you being a good worm? What if you were a parasite? Would you be a good parasite if you decided to give up your sinful mooching, or is the whole point of being a parasite to be a mooch? (Perhaps this is a karmic cure for people pleasers). We forgive nature, or forgiveness is not even in the picture, so why can’t we forgive humans? And how come, it is implied, we all start from the “lowly” life forms—paramecia and so on—before we linearly progress to the “higher” ones, a.k.a. us? Is it just a matter of time, in which case karma is another instance of generational wealth gone amok? The idea of karma makes it as if it is your soul’s fault you are not successful (whatever that means), because of your school record in a past life. Or your fault you’re sick or have certain addictions, because of causes and conditions you cannot escape.
When a friend was assigned to design a world religion in high school (a very enlightened high school), he eventually came up with: one that believes in reincarnation but in which the process of reincarnating is completely random. Through eternity (which is not forever, but still inside time), everybody eventually becomes everybody else, every other thing, no exceptions. This would be a truly egoless religion, not one that plays a weird spiritual game where one thinks they’re rich or beautiful because they were chosen by God. And wouldn’t you want to be kind to others because in another life, that could literally be you?
It would be best, of course, if instead of everyone being every other being eventually, we are all already simultaneously everyone else. That would be the best religion in the world: one that is reliant on oneness in the here and now. My favorite living philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup, explains it this way through science, the modern religion: after all, in the mundane realm, we know about Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder), in which one human being can contain multiple identities and personalities that have completely different self-consistent ways of being. For whatever reason, they are dissociated from one another, and the dissociation can be such that one identity of the same person can be blind, while another identity can see perfectly well. Sometimes these different self-contained identities don’t know about each other at all, but sometimes they can be conscious of each other and even try to dominate.
What if, Kastrup asks, we are all dissociated identities of a universal consciousness? In that way, just as a single person can contain multiple “self-contained” people, a single cosmic mind can contain all of us. And being organic, dissociative boundaries are not perfect. Maybe the people who have religious experiences—which often are described in terms of a transcendent oneness, union, etc.—are just experiencing less dissociation for the moment.
You right now are a simultaneous reincarnation of everyone else, as everyone else is a reincarnation of you. We have just forgotten.
According to Kastrup, we already believe this in a sense: after all, if you think back to your five-year-old self, which presumably you believe to be yourself, there is not one atom of you that has not changed since that time. Your blood, your bones, your height, also your interests, your opinions, your tastes for vegetables even… you might have similar DNA, but twins still consider themselves to be separate people. You probably have more in common now with a friend or colleague or even a random stranger than you do with your five-year-old self. Yet you consider that five-year-old “yourself”: why? Even the continuity of being “you” is broken by sleep. Just because you happen to have that five-year-old’s memories from a first-person perspective? If one day, someone else’s first-person memories could be implanted into you, would that boundary blur?
Kastrup seems to think we have a weird boundary around space versus time: we have no problem believing we are the same self through time—through all our changes—but find it hard to believe we are the same self across space: with the person in front of us. “You have very nearly the same reason to think you were your five-year-old self as you have reason to think you are an Iranian in Tehran right now,” he has said. But we can’t seem to traverse that dissociative boundary of space.
And oneness in this sense does seem scary: reminded again of a friend who wants to love her husband as herself, as a separate being loving a separate being, instead of one thing loving itself. Maybe that’s what God wanted, too. God wanted to experience diversity.
I like this description of what God wants from us, via Miranda July’s Substack:
The Best Elijah
A Rabbi said to a young man named Elijah: and when you get to the pearly gates will you have been the best Elijah, Elijah? That is the goal, not being good.
Certainly I’m not going to be the best Bernardo. That still seems like a lot of responsibility though, to be the best possible Lei. But I think the best possible me would be a me who was not so concerned about being the best possible anything, someone who does not think my life is really about lil ol’ me and my personal happiness.
I think the best religion in the world would be one where, instead of asking God or the universe: what can you do for me?, it asks: what do you need from me? A yoga teacher once told me that she liked to ask: “How does life want to be lived through me?” How can I, separate as I am, unique with my talents and limitations, destined to one day return to the oneness, be an expression of universal will while I can? We’re all going to be enlightened one day—it’s inevitable. What can we do in the meantime? (The secret: we’re already doing it.)
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