For some, meditation provides an immediate sense of calm. Eyes closed, they may see shimmering lights or bright pastels, their bodies loosening into the peaceful rest they’ve longed for.
I am not one of those people. For me, meditation began as a surprisingly jolting activity—a forced listening to the bullhorn of my all-too-familiar narratives, chowder of feelings, and fantasies. My mind’s chatter is relentless. Something like the radios installed in each North Korean home. You can turn them down, but never fully off.
It’s not just the psychotic who experience internal voices. Who hasn’t had wakeful nights and said the following morning to a friend, “I couldn’t turn off the voices in my head!” It shouldn’t surprise me that the same where to and what next fantasies fueling my actions daylong blare more starkly on a meditation cushion, maybe even more so because they are pressed up against sitting still, clamoring at the starting gate of my race forward. I plan various cabins in the country room to room, exotic trips to foreign lands, trekking adven- tures. Sometimes the residue from something thoughtless said to a friend haunts me. Other times a burn from the perceived insult by a family member circulates and recirculates.
In Buddhism, I learn there’s a concept for all this mental proliferation: papancha. In the Pali language from which it originates, the etymology comes from the image of a drop of dye on a fabric—the ink seeps in all directions of weft and warp until the fabric is ruined. We see the world through the stain of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell ourselves about others.
Unsplash Photo by Pawel Czerwinski
But here’s meditation’s eventual redemption—I am able to see more and more clearly how my mind grabs the chaos of experience and shapes it into narratives almost instantaneously. With my eyes closed on a meditation cushion in a quiet, darkened room, those incessant voices that rarely stop become less and less believable. Their tones and lapses shadowy, slurred, repetitive, loud, soft, high, low. Faces known and unknown. They come and go at random, and they blow out of proportion according to old scripts and emotions. An echo chamber clearly generated from inside, not outside.
I am learning that we suffer from a kind of virtual life, distress not so much from direct experience as much as from rewinding past events or fast-forwarding a possible future on a movie screen inside our skulls.
When he is young, my son asks me, “How do you know your dreams aren’t reality, and reality isn’t your dream?”
Indeed. How do you know? I am less and less sure myself.