Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  Behind our closed eyes, his presence filled the room, his laboured breathing became our breathing. The clock ticked. Sometimes, in the far distance, you might hear a train hooting, or, on one afternoon, very faintly, an ambulance. More often dogs barked, a chained dog barking at others passing by, I thought. Thoughts, thoughts. I made my objective note. The minutes passed. Coleman was silent. There was no hurry. At the same time a fine tension began to creep around the room, a collective waiting for his voice; when at last it did ring out, we started. It seemed to speak from inside us.

  ‘May all beings live in peace.’

  Guiding the meditations, Coleman had a deeper, more measured, sonorous voice than the one he used in his talks. ‘May all beings be free from all attachment and all sorrow. May all beings be filled with happiness and sympathetic joy.’

  ‘Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu.’

  I didn’t say the words myself, but I assented.

  He began tamely. He had us focus on the breath for some minutes, the breath crossing the lip. When he didn’t speak for a while, you wondered if he mightn’t have fallen asleep. Then the voice boomed out again. No doubt because our eyes were closed and because we were sitting so still for so long, sounds became physical things. The clock ticked in fingers and toes. The gong that began and ended each session tingled in my cheeks. A door slamming was a slap. Coleman’s voice clanged a bell in your chest. Your body rang.

  ‘Now we will take our attention away from the breath,’ he said calmly, ‘and move it upwards to the top of the skull.’ He began to lead us through our bodies, and when Coleman named a part of the body it really was easier for you to get in contact with it, easier than if you were meditating alone. Naming a part of the body, his voice touched it, but without using any mystical formulas. ‘Now move your attention to your cheeks. To the left cheek. To the right cheek. To both cheeks. Pay attention. Take note of any sensation that arises in this part of the body.’

  His timing was impressive. He would have you concentrate on a wrist, thigh, or shoulder to the point that it became an agony to be so focused. I had never imagined that this combination of emptying the mind of thought and concentrating it on physical sensation could be such hard work. ‘Feel how the sensation changes, in your hands, the back of the hands, the fingers, the fingertips, constantly changes, infinitely nuanced, infinitely delicate; anicca, know anicca.’

  Then after a long pause, just when it seemed you couldn’t maintain this focus a moment longer, he would say: ‘And now, let go. Not holding on to the sensation if it’s pleasurable. Not fighting the sensation if it’s painful. Just . . . let . . . go.’

  And I did. It was as if Coleman, Coleman’s voice, were able to command those waves of release I had come across so unexpectedly in paradoxical relaxation. He commanded and I let go; a strange fluid rushed in, rigidity dissolved.

  ‘Deeper,’ Coleman insisted. ‘Deeper and deeper, into the muscle, into the bone. Feel the sensation in the very bone. Feel that even the bone is subject to change. Anicca.’

  We were concentrating on the arms, the elbows, and now it seemed I really was feeling the two bones in my right forearm. The ulna and the radius were present to me, their shape and consistency. It was the first time Coleman had invited us to go into the bone and, sceptical as I always am, I wondered if this was hypnotism. Was I the object of some clever hypnotic suggestion? But if it was hypnotism, would I be able to wonder if it was hypnotism?

  ‘Let go,’ Coleman said softly, ‘just let go,’ and another barrier went. I began to look forward to him saying the words. I was disappointed when he didn’t. I realised that in the future, meditating alone at home, I would say this formula to myself – let go – imagining Coleman saying it, imagining his voice and the particular cadence he used, and I would feel how much more effective the words would have been if he were there in person to say them.

  I decided I would, after all, make an appointment to see Coleman and signed myself in on the morning of the eighth day. Standing outside his door, I felt unexpectedly emotional. I had made a considerable effort over the last day or so not to plan a speech, or imagine the conversation, or even make a list of things to say. All the same, the meeting had begun to loom in my mind as something special. Outside his door I felt agitated. Something important was at stake. The feeling irritated me. I was an adult, canny, experienced and illusion-free. Why on earth was I going to talk to a guru?

  With impressive punctuality, the woman before me came out of the room together with the translator and I went in and sat down. Coleman smiled and asked me if I had got my voice back and I said, ‘Now we’ll see.’

  ‘Bravo!’ he laughed.

  It was a small sitting room with two armchairs arranged face to face and the shutters half closed against the August sun. I asked him how come he was limping so badly and he explained that they had been moving him around a conference complex in Malaysia on an open golf buggy when the driver braked hard and he had fallen out of the buggy and broken his hip.

  Coleman spent some minutes describing the accident and the hospital. He seemed oddly enthusiastic about it all. ‘The Malaysian nurses were wonderful!’ Then he asked, ‘But how are you getting on?’

  I told him the retreat had stirred up a lot of emotions and reflections.

  He waited.

  I looked at him. He smiled at me. Not inviting, just waiting. The problem was, I said, that I didn’t see how one could go on living the same way one always had and incorporate Vipassana into that. I felt this discipline was demanding pride of place, demanding that my whole life change.

  Even as I said these portentous things I appreciated that had someone like myself made this kind of declaration, this admission of weakness, to my mother and father in their evangelical heyday, they would have had him on his knees giving his heart to Jesus in no time at all. There would have been tears and prayers and rivers of emotion. Coleman raised a bushy eyebrow. After a long pause he said: ‘A lot of people get that idea into their heads.’

  I was a little thrown. I waited but nothing more was forthcoming.

  ‘Well,’ I eventually said, ‘I’m being asked to look on life as an affliction, a source of suffering, and to learn not to want it, whereas, the truth is I find the whole thing very beautiful. Living. These hills, the people here. I’m very attached to it all. Perhaps that’s why I don’t see how Vipassana is compatible. With the way I live, I mean. I keep feeling I’m being asked to say goodbye to life.’

  Coleman was attentive, pleasant, distant. Again, after a pause, he said, ‘Concentrate on anicca, get to know anicca.’

  This did begin to sound like, ‘Get to know our Lord Jesus.’ I felt annoyed. I could play mute as well as anyone, I decided. I wouldn’t say anything else till he started taking the interview seriously.

  We watched each other. He seemed to understand my decision and instead of prolonging the silence asked, ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I teach translation. And write books.’

  ‘How interesting. What kind of books?’

  ‘Novels, essays.’

  He sat smiling at me. I waited. Then I realised he was smiling because he knew I was waiting for him to ask another question about my books, so that I could talk about them. And he wasn’t going to.

  ‘I mean,’ I said hurriedly, ‘I wonder how one can square writing, desiring success, with Vipassana. I’ve been wondering if I should stop.’

  ‘Vipassana?’

  ‘No, writing.’

  ‘Oh.’ He frowned and sighed. ‘You know, lots of people come to these retreats and get it into their heads they should retire to a monastery or something. I can’t see why.’

  I was beginning to find the encounter galling. ‘Well, monks don’t write books, do they? The two things are evidently incompatible.’

  Again the slow smile. ‘Monks don’t do lots of things. Who said you have to be a monk?’

  ‘The fact is, more than anything else, words seem to take me away from the present mom
ent. I’m never really here. Always word-mongering. I feel a lot of what’s wrong with my life comes from words.’

  He always waited a while before replying.

  ‘We’re speaking now,’ he eventually said. ‘We’re using words now. It’s quite pleasant, isn’t it? Maybe useful.’

  ‘It’s different with books.’

  The way he watched made you feel that despite his eighty and more years, he was focused on you, he cared. Then the answers were offhand.

  ‘But books are wonderful things.’ He chuckled. ‘I even wrote one myself way back.’

  ‘The Tranquil Mind.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I had seen a copy on the table outside the meditation room.

  ‘It’s not a very good book, I don’t think, but an effective way of communicating a lot of information to a large number of people.’

  Realising I would get nowhere, I said abruptly, ‘Mr Coleman, perhaps you could help me with a smaller thing. I have trouble sitting up straight when I’m meditating. Especially here. At home I seem to manage. Here my back just collapses. I keep feeling I’m going to keel over.’

  Coleman reflected, or appeared to. Perhaps it was the merest performance.

  ‘I used to have a lot of problems sitting up straight,’ he said.

  ‘But what can I do?’

  He breathed deeply. ‘I wonder why you want to sit up straight.’

  ‘Well, because it would be more comfortable, for a start, better for my back. I’d breathe better.’

  He seemed unconvinced. ‘I wouldn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘It does seem a fair thing to want, though.’

  He looked out of the window. Perhaps he was going senile. He was losing touch.

  ‘Sure.’ He turned back to me. ‘Everybody would prefer to sit up straight, yes.’ He waited. ‘You know, sometimes, when things don’t happen for us, it’s because we want them too much.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Anicca,’ he said. ‘Concentrate on anicca.’ He leaned forward and offered me his hand. ‘It would be interesting to go on talking, but I only have fifteen minutes per person.’

  So that was it! I shook his hand, smiled daggers and went to the door in a fury. I had demeaned myself coming to talk to a guru and he had barely acknowledged my existence. So much for acquiring wisdom. As I left, an elderly man was waiting to come in. Coleman was running to schedule.

  I stood in the stone corridor. It had recently been renovated and whitewashed but the Gothic arches round the doorways still kept their antique feel. The window at the far end was a square of brilliant light around the dark candle of a cypress outside. I went to look. The hills were ablaze with dusty sunshine. Down on the lawn, smoking and sunning herself on a deckchair, was the pretty young woman I’d caught Coleman talking to the first days of the retreat. She was taking time out. Join her, I decided. The hell with it.

  Downstairs, approaching the main entrance, I stopped. The old bastard had called my bluff. He had seen through me. I was that simple. I shook my head, hesitated, and turned back down the corridor.

  I had never entered the meditation room in the middle of a session. I closed the door as quietly as I could, and even so, as it clicked, a tremor ran through the bodies around me. The door was at the back of the room where three or four people sat on chairs. I passed them and padded barefoot up the narrow space between the men, two by two on mats to the left, and the women, two by two to the right. The four windows along the right-hand wall were open and a soft summeriness drifted in. Nevertheless I was aware of an intense, still calm, a hum almost. There was a collective mental energy around me that seemed tangible, as though I were wading through a warm sea of mind.

  Having reached my place, I stood still to take a last look. Rows and rows of seated and kneeling figures. A fat man on a mountain of cushions. A gaunt Arab-looking boy who used nothing more than a low block of wood for a seat. Some sat straight-backed, some bowed. There were smooth, untroubled faces, frowning faces, faces smiling faintly. Some had all the gear, the oriental shawls, the cushions with esoteric symbols; some wore washed-out shorts, shapeless T-shirts. The pregnant woman was serene in a half lotus. One man rested his hands on his knees, the palms turned up, forefinger and thumb just touching. Another let his arms drop in his lap. Then I saw that the elderly woman to my right had a fly on her cheek. A black blowfly. It was walking up from her neck to her cheek. She didn’t flinch. The clock ticked. The fly followed her hairline above an ear. She had greying hair tied in a bun. Was she aware of the creature or not?

  I sat down. I was glad I had come back. I felt privileged to have seen the room when everyone was so still and concentrated. I settled down as quietly as I could and closed my eyes. My anger with Coleman had abated. He had been right to suspect my reasons for wanting to sit up straight. I wanted to prove I could do it, to myself and others. Exhibitionism. Perhaps he was right about the writing too. Maybe the real change would be to stop trying to impress myself with all this talk of drastic changes. ‘A lot of people get that idea into their heads,’ he had said. And: ‘I used to have problems sitting up straight myself.’ You and I are alike and like the others too, he was saying. Don’t look for some special relationship with me because you’re a tortured writer. He’d been very polite, I thought. He wasn’t proselytising, he wasn’t out to recruit disciples. I closed my eyes and waited for the breath to declare itself on my upper lip.

  Charity

  THINGS AS THEY are. This bowl. The table. White yoghurt. At the last breakfast I was overwhelmed by the sheer presence of it all. This bread, this square of butter. Things as they are. My hand. The blemished skin, a scarred knuckle, a dirty fingernail. Everything was intensely itself, source at once of fascination and indifference. Scattered crumbs, splashed milk. I gazed at them. As in a Cézanne, each object had been set free from the mesh of human interpretation. A cup beside a slice of melon. Absolutely themselves. I say the words now – cup, melon – but my mind at the time was wordless. The cup, the melon, were things without words, not in relation, not part of a sentence or a story. And there was no distance between us. I was in the cup, I was sticky with melon. Raising my eyes, I looked at the young man across the table, cheeks freshly shaven, a red T-shirt, a tattoo on his middle finger. The tattoo mimicked a ring, etched into his skin. I watched. He was holding a biscuit, using a knife to smear it with pink jam. It was too intense. The jam was too pink. The strong fingers too present. I was touching them. The fingers were touching me. Watching was touching. Words protect us perhaps. Words keep the world at bay. I say that now. The thought didn’t occur to me then. I was tongue-tied, there, in the middle of it all. I really was right there.

  In slow motion we went to the meditation room. The man behind me took his place, eyes closed, lips pressed together. I hadn’t heard him cough for days. The man in front was a sack of coal, bulk settling into bulk. The woman to my right perched electrically still; she was a bird, a parrot. She could fly off at any moment.

  I closed my eyes and waited. Sure enough, other eyes opened in the dark. I was in the pitch dark putting out to sea. Mine was a frail craft, an oarless skiff. I wasn’t concerned. I had put out to sea before without coming back. It wasn’t a problem. The keel grated on the stones and bobbed free, free as the breath floating on my lip.

  How quickly I’d got going!

  Time passed. Despite sitting still, my body was twisting; my face had detached itself from my head, it was drifting away: lips, nose and eyes stretched and skewed like a gargoyle’s. It didn’t matter. The sea has its tides and currents. Looking across the space between skull and skin, I saw coils of grey smoke under my nostrils. I watched the smoke turn. It seemed extraordinarily delicate. The coils were very tight and fluffy among the hairs poking from my nostrils.

  ‘May all beings,’ Coleman’s voice boomed out, ‘be free from all attachment.’ A tremor stiffened my back. I hadn’t heard him come in. He sighed heavily and said, ‘Today, our last day, t
he Metta bhavana. Today, the sharing of merits.’ Raising his voice to its most vatic and hypnotic, Coleman began to read:

  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

  Damn. The wave that swept across me now was the exact opposite of a wave of relaxation. Nothing could have jerked me more sharply out of my tranced focus on the present moment than these words, nothing could have thrust me more forcibly back into history and narrative. I Corinthians 13 was Dad’s favourite passage from St Paul. For a moment my father’s voice and Coleman’s were one. My little boat sank like a stone.

  And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

  Charity! My mind raced. Why was Coleman reading this? Did he know my past? I saw my father in the pulpit, robes gleaming in the sunlight that fell through the rose window on summer mornings, bald head gleaming. These were the words, he believed, that more than any other established Christianity’s superiority. St Paul’s great hymn to charity. Being read by a Buddhist.