The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  The Gatwick taught me first and foremost about the dire state of housing in Australia (there are 34,000 people on the public housing waiting in Victoria alone), and the people there showed me that my experiences of the world didn’t justify me seeing things in such a dim way. I wasn’t entitled to take drugs because of my suffering. My drug use felt childish and decadent — I was surrendering my obligation to make meaning out of an often-absurd world to a drug that I knew would make me psychotic.

  After my third relapse, I decided to stop using for the remainder of my time in Melbourne, and eventually I caught a plane to Malaysia.

  I travelled from Kuala Lumpur to Penang to Phuket, and then to a sizzling hot, cat-piss stained communal-living ‘art space’ on the fringes of Bangkok city. Curious, short on cash, I shared a room with ten other people that was covered in paintings and graffiti and poetry, and cost just over $4 a night.

  I had arrived, in my ignorance, just in time for Bangkok’s hot, humid April. It was 37 degrees every day with 80 per cent humidity; the art-space was in a five-storey building in a non-tourist part of town, and it was permanently boiling inside it.

  I must have been there no more than a week when I had a fight with a young English guy that started me on a new train of thought: why am I so angry? Why am I the only person unable to cope with the sweltering conditions?

  In the cold — make that obscenely hot and sweaty — light of day, I began to think that I was a very angry man. My anger was making me unhappy, I was having trouble escaping it, and it was making a very nasty, unpleasant person at times. I wondered if it was the after-effects of crystal meth? A part of my personality that grew and grew during months of drug use, and had then become part of who I was? I knew though, that in truth I had been full of rage for a long time.

  Prior to this time, I had never read about anger — at least not from a personal perspective. I had always been focused on the things that made me angry, deciding that I would rather be angry than passive, and that there were things worth fighting for and getting angry about.

  About an hour’s walk away from the art-space was Khao San Road, the tourist area of Bangkok, renowned for its trashiness and its often trashy book stands. Walking past one day, I spotted Buddha by one of my favourite authors: the ex-nun Karen Armstrong. I read her biography of the Gautama, Buddha, as well as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. The story of the Buddha was so simple, and it started to make a lot of sense to me.

  Guatama was born into a rich family, perhaps a royal family. When he first left his family, he saw many people suffering from physical pain, poverty and also from old age. He went to try to discover why so many people suffered. At first he starved himself, inflicted himself with pain, and sought what we might call ‘altered states of consciousness’. This nearly killed him. He decided he needed to find a balance between nihilism and self-indulgence, so he spent many years meditating in the jungle, and discovered what we today call ‘Enlightenment’ — an experience that is beyond the power of words to describe.

  Buddhism involves a complex number of teachings and ideas, but the starting point resonated with me — namely that the cause of human suffering, or dukkha, is desire, and that the alternative to desire is enlightenment. I wanted to be on the path to enlightenment.

  The Wat Phra That Doi Suthep (aka The Golden Temple) sits halfway up a Himalayan mountain directly facing Chiang Mai city in Northern Thailand. It’s a half-hour tuk-tuk drive up the Doi Suthep mountain to reach the temple. The mountain landscape changes about every three or four kilometres along the incline: from dry bamboo forest to wet, mossy landscapes to flowers, to mixtures of all three. Until finally you arrive at the temple, with its 20-foot Buddha at the entrance of 230 steps, surrounded by jungle park, with cool misty air that smells of the forest surrounding it, and views over Chiang Mai — the city of one million emerging as just one valley among endless Himalayan rises.

  At the temple, I saw a sign for the ‘Vipassana Mindfulness Silent Meditation Centre’. Vipassana means ‘to see things as they really are’. I had tried mindfulness in Australia in a silly psychology clinic about three years earlier and found it completely unhelpful. In fact, I regarded the application of mindfulness in the West as nothing but another fad in the discipline of psychology — which, to date, had been hit-and-mess in providing me with the help I often felt I needed. But there was something about the Golden Temple that made me feel that it was worth trying. I went in to make an inquiry, and was told I needed to make a booking, and that the course was by donation only.

  I spent a few more weeks in Chiang Mai, staying in a hostel, abstaining from everything. I found a new level of hunger for the company of others as well as for reading, including some of the ‘difficult novels’ and a book called Wisdom of the Buddha: the unabridged Dhammapada.

  This was all well and good, until I ran out of money again. I emailed the vipassana centre, and they said I could pay just $2 a day if I wanted, but I had to follow a number of ethical precepts as well as the ‘Terms of Abstaining’, which included abstaining from stealing, ‘false speech’ (actually we weren’t allowed to talk at all), singing, dancing, eating after noon, and over-indulging in sleep.

  A few days later, I enrolled and was shown the basic meditation technique. I participated in an introductory ceremony in a big hall with the head monk, Sunny. I sat in lotus position in front of him as he sat in his bright orange robes, and, as required, I had to sing a hymn in Thai, then present him with some flowers.

  ‘You may think you are your name, your job, who your friends are, what you thinking, what you are thinking — but there is a deeper level to your Self and that is what you are here to find,’ he told me.

  And then there was nothing to do, no talking, no TV, no reading or writing — nothing to do except meditate.

  Fourteen hours a day just sitting and breathing, slow-walking and meditating in front of Buddha statues. I was told to notice my thoughts, but to not attach to them — rather, I was to just watch them float away. While I believed I had already thought through my anger, all the thoughts I had were angry thoughts — anger with my parents, anger about triple j, anger about high school. There were no distractions, and it all felt so unpleasant. It made it nearly impossible for me to meditate.

  I was looking forward to my meeting with Sunny; I hoped he would offer me some words of advice to help me with these awful feelings. When we sat down together the next day, he asked me how meditation was going, and I said, ‘I feel so angry, I just keep — ’ and he cut right in: ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Everyone finds it difficult, what you need to do is just breathe.’ And then he sang, ‘Rising, falling, rising, falling, rising, falling.’

  And then: ‘I’ll see you tonight for the evening chant.’

  Apparently Buddhism is not psychotherapy. Words were cheap at the Doi Suthep. Western philosophy privileges thought; many strands of eastern philosophy do not.

  I spent all the next day just breathing out slowly and not being able to concentrate, and getting hungrier and more fatigued, and exhausted. Then the evening chant — all of us sitting on the floor, chanting together for forty-five minutes.

  And then prayer. I was still light-headed from the lack of food and sleep, but this somehow made me feel serene, almost trance-like, and I could start to focus on the stillness, a bit and then a bit more. An angry thought came up — this one about my parents — and I just kept breathing, and it seemed to fade away through lack of significance. And then after more chanting, and three solid minutes of meditation, I experienced for the first time moments of near-complete stillness and the thoughts stopped. When the angry thoughts came up again, I was flushed with visions of red and purple and pink as the images dissipated and broke down. These colours became spectacular tropical flowers that danced around in my head, and suddenly I had deep feelings of awe and calm.

  That night, when the meditation stopped and I sat inside my room
dressed in my meditation whites, amid the fire-flies and the geckos and above the Chiang Mai city lights below, I began to think about how I hadn’t realised all these angry thoughts were so pervasive. Many of them, I concluded, were petty; others did not examine the entire context of the event in question; almost all lacked perspective and empathy. None of them examined the morality of my own behavior. More than that, I realised that so many of the things I was angry about were actually in my own imagination — a kind of paranoia, or low-level psychosis was giving me an unnecessarily grim and bitter view of the world.

  Mindfulness in this way, done properly, divorced from corporate goals and corporate mumbo-jumbo, can tear open your skull, and when it does you might find something that resembles a chaotic TV screen — constantly changing channels featuring random memories, future projections, fuzz, hatred, and resentment. Crystal meth didn’t stop the flow — its creation of a movie-like vortex only fostered the delusion that the mind was coherent and wondrous. It is quieting the mind, not speeding it up where, perhaps, ultimate fulfillment can be found.

  More meditation the next day, and while my concentration levels and impulse control made it extremely difficult for me to meditate, I noticed nonetheless a feeling of calm that, over the next few days, increased. The angry thoughts eventually just faded away. Once they started to fade away, I felt extremely clear, and I began to wonder why I had spent so long dwelling on people’s bad sides — many of which were in my own imagination — that I failed to see the good in people. So after meditation, I started thinking about all the good things people had done for me, especially my parents, and I realised these far, far outweighed the bad. And when I thought of the bad things, I put them in context, and tried to think about why they did that, and that, like me, they had this dreadful thing called the mind which was often petty, incoherent, vain, and deeply flawed.

  And I wondered, How can I have expectations for others, when our minds are just so inherently problematic?

  I eventually chose a little temple just outside the main building and sat cross-legged in front of a 12-foot white Buddha — his body floating amid the vines and the flowers, and an elaborate crumbling cemetery behind him.

  The austerity, abstinence, and ritual made my mind float, too. And the rhythm — the rhythm of the chants, rhythm of the breath, the rhythm of life and death. We are all impermanent; desire is the cause of all suffering; phenomena is unstable, transient, disenchanting.

  I took a walk back to my villa, and pulled out the book I’d been reading: Wisdom of the Buddha.

  ‘The body is wasted, full of sickness, and frail: this heap of corruption breaks into pieces, life indeed ends is death’.

  Yes, reading was against the rules, and actually I didn’t even last the full week because I was so damn hungry. But what I can tell you is that on the way out, I stared up at a pagoda as its spire pierced the sky, and I watched as the clouds floated past; I might have been a no-hoper, a fuckwit, and a cliché, I might have just been lost in delusion and lost in the self, desperate for answers after the inevitable failure of my ‘chemical philosophy’ — but what I felt then was a sense of the sublime.

  When I returned to Chiang Mai city, in the three days after the camp I felt so very calm and grateful, and dare I say it — happy. Happy as Larry, happy as a pig in shit, and I sent a few people close to me some heartfelt messages about how happy I was and how glad I was that they were in my life. Possibly they thought I had re-discovered MDMA. My mum in particular was delighted to hear from me, and I told her all about my trip, and amid the cheery small talk, I felt a sense of acceptance. We are both deeply flawed, I thought. The fight earlier in the year became fluid, unfrozen, it became water under the bridge — a strong bridge which had ultimately not faltered under even more trying arguments. She had, after all, put up with an awful lot from me. She was always there to help when she could.

  And I needed help. The body is wasted and full of sickness. I had been using the same anti-depressants for four years by the time I got to Chiang Mai, and shortly after I left the mindfulness camp, I discovered that those anti-depressants were extremely hard to find in Thailand’s northern city. After about three days without taking them — tablets designed to reduce anxiety, depression, and back pain — I felt uneasy, and had a flurry of thoughts about how unfair people had been to me. I felt my career had been a disaster, I felt panic, then despair. On one level, I knew that I was feeling this way because I had stopped taking the tablets, but my thoughts and feelings seemed so sincere. I tried mindfulness meditation, and it gave me only temporary relief. I began to wonder what value spirituality, when it seemed my ‘self’ was little more than a chemical reaction. I began sending out pitches to editors so full of typos and mixed up sentences that I never got a reply. The drafts of the final chapters to this book were sent back from Scribe with the message: ‘I have never seen anything like this in all my years of editing.’ When I looked back over them, I had long, nonsensical sentences with no punctuation that didn’t mean anything. In less than a week without tablets, I faded into a dread-ridden, dreadful ghost — and in that week, other people reacted to me strangely and even street dogs, for the first time, began getting aggressive as I walked past. This was again a loss of agency, an apparent limit of freedom, and again I was dependent on my mother.

  Mum ending up sending me through $500 to buy anti-depressants. Not only did I not have any money for anti-depressants, but in the ten days in total I was off them, I had screwed up nearly every professional relationship I had — at least in the short-term — and she sent me another $500 a week later, with the message ‘I love you’.

  There was no escaping the fact that, for better or worse, I had been taking those tablets so long they were like food or water, and without them, not even the more austere, dedicated life would make any difference.

  Once that was settled, once that little piece of humility was learnt, I could concentrate on higher-order things, and the more my days wore on in Chiang Mai, the more inescapable the conclusion that ‘the less I have the better I am’ — self-evidently the opposite of the drug addiction ætiology of ‘there is never enough’. Tablets might rescue me from despair; once that was established, there was still the pressing question of meaning, and indeed, freedom to deal with. I was finally aware what a wonderful luxury it is in life to not be bogged down by pain, misery, or poverty, and to be in a position to ask myself life’s complicated spiritual questions.

  I felt that the clues had been laid out for me during the mindfulness camp; mindfulness was about the joy and fulfillment of subduing one’s mind, rather than accelerating it. It was slowing down and letting go, rather than clinging to things. I wondered about the links between a drug binge and a spiritual journey; I wondered if instead of a weekend of over-indulgence to de-clutter and start again, perhaps what I needed to do what start weekends of austerity. Generosity is a near constant theme in Buddhism, along with morality, patience, enthusiasm, concentration, and wisdom. I already knew was it wasn’t possible to experience the other or the other’s need when I was on the drug. There was, I began to think, an alternative to this cycle. Trips into the netherworld of our minds could be achieved through weekends of austerity and meditation, and not through drug binges.

  I was living in a cheap hotel in Chiang Mai with a TV and a bathroom. But I decided to take my austerity to another level. I went to Kathmandu, Nepal, and moved into a small room in a hostel: no TV, no Wi-Fi, no computer, no phone, and a shared bathroom (but with multiple packs of my anti-depressants).

  Kathmandu is a dusty, cluttered city in a valley — it was almost purely an agricultural district a hundred years ago. It is full of Buddha and Hindu statues, and yes, suffering: poverty, stray dogs, and street people — including children who live on the sidewalk.

  The suffering was difficult to digest at times; it also seemed outside of my control, and unlike the social and political problems in Australia, whic
h obviously paled in comparison, I did not feel the same sense of being able to place cultural explanations for my present own problems. Whenever I saw the cruelty often inflicted on stray dogs and street people, I did my best to stop it. Otherwise, the problems faced by them seemed totally insurmountable, which, in the end, confirmed my ideas that empathy and compassion are lofty ideals and higher-order human and social functions.

  I have to admit I liked Kathmandu because it was cheap and weird; it didn’t matter how you dressed or what you looked like, and it was full of strange bookshops. I found a book called Transcending Madness by a Tibetan Buddhist called Chögyam Trungpa, in which he writes:

  Ego is that which is constant, it is always involved in some kind of paranoia, some of kind of panic, always some kind of hope and fear. Sanity is therefore experiencing things as they are.

  Trungpa draws on the Buddhist idea of the six ‘Bardos’ — the six realms of human existence we are continually cycling in and out of. One of the realms is the ‘Hungry Ghost’ realm — a source of anger, greed, ignorance, lust, envy, and pride. The Hungry Ghost means you don’t want to give anything; you just take. The more you get, the more you want to receive. Ultimately, this leads to aggression, Trungpa writes, because you want to destroy anything that reminds you of giving.

  However, our ‘Hungry Ghost’ is also useful: we should not seek to exorcise it, instead, he says we should recognise how it operates and know when we are in its realm. The Hungry Ghost can lead to two types of pain: the first is not being to achieve what you want to achieve; the second occurs once you already have your desires filled, but you have a kind of nostalgia for desire. So this second pain occurs when you are already full, but you miss being hungry — it is at that point, perhaps, you should seek to enter the world of nothingness.