The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  At the end of every day, a grainy video lesson from S. N. Goenka is projected on the back wall. Everything I am experiencing is, I think, to be expected. ‘It would be wise to understand that what seems to be a problem is actually an indication the technique has started to work,’ he says. ‘The operation into the unconscious has begun and some of the pus has started to come out of the wound. Although the process is unpleasant, this is the only way to get rid of the pus; to remove the impurities.’

  Following this, we are permitted to come to the front, to ask the resident course leader questions about our practice. One evening, I hear someone confess that he has been in so much pain that his entire body was shaking. He is advised to concentrate on his palms and the soles of his feet. Aside from that exchange, I have no way of gauging how I am getting along, comparatively speaking. I have come to understand, though, that I am annoying people. During rest periods, I keep accidentally sitting with my feet pointing towards the teacher, which is forbidden. My nostril keeps whistling, irritatingly. I fidget, and am ceaseless in my attempts at engineering an elaborate system of pulleys and ties with rolled-up blankets to ease the pressure from my painful limbs. Yesterday morning, I sneezed all over the back of the man in front of me. I am, I have decided, the worst meditator here.

  The only person who rivals my position in the ranks of the abysmal is the man who walks about with his mouth wide open. When he kneels to meditate, I can see that he doesn’t wear underpants. Sometimes he goes to sleep, right there in the pagoda. You can hear him snoring. The person nearest me, meanwhile, is the best practitioner of all. Of Indian appearance, he arrives early in immaculate sportswear and does stretching exercises in which he puts his ankle on a wall and bends his head to meet it. He is a vision of Zen perfection, whereas I am useless – fidgeting and sore and cowering from the ghosts of ancient lovers.

  Sin, of course, requires other people. And so it is that, over these first few days, silence makes saints of us all. Without the ability to speak or even look at anyone, I begin to feel myself humming with a perfect, holy sila. Goenka is just about the only human we hear from and the sound of his voice begins to possess me, taking over my internal monologue. He has a habit of repeating various catchphrases and, at times, that is all I can hear in my head: ‘Peeeerfect equanimity, peeeeerfect equanimity’; ‘Aaaaasss it is, aaaaassss it is’; ‘Work haaaaaard, work diligently; work seeerrrriously.’ In my room, on a break one evening, I only realise that I have been chanting these mantras out loud when a deliberately loud cough in a neighbouring room breaks my trance. I stop, shocked at the realisation of what I have been doing, and notice a fly buzzing at my window. The urge is to kill it but – mindful of Goenka’s teaching, that every time you break a rule you generate ‘deep deep sankaras, deep deep sankaras and that means deep deep misery’ – I resolve not to. I have no idea what a deep deep sankara is, but I definitely do not like the sound of it. So I just sit there, on my bed, rocking gently back and forth. As I do, I become anxious about the rule that forbids writing anything down during the course. I have smuggled a pen and pad into my room in order to make notes. And then there is the $50 that I found in the coin pocket of my trousers. I’m not supposed to have money. Have I failed somehow? Will all this affect things?

  My only relief comes during the periods following meals, when I wander the woods alone repeating Goenka’s favourite lines over and over to myself, enjoying the noise of my voice and spooking the lizards, who I keep catching examining me coldly from behind dead leaves. I develop a routine. There is a little clearing that nobody else knows about. I go there after meals, just in time to let the rainwater that I drank earlier drain out through the fence, spraying into the bushland beyond. I remain in the clearing, walking in small circles, until it is time to drag myself reluctantly back into the pagoda.

  The meditation gets no easier. I notice that there seems to be some sort of enforcement going on. One morning, I glance up to see a volunteer handing the pantless boy a piece of white paper. He is informed that the teacher wants to see him. When we return for the afternoon session, he is gone. All of his cushions have been cleared away. It is as if he had never been there at all.

  Soon, we are issued new instructions. Instead of concentrating on the breath entering our noses, we are to focus on tiny sensations in our upper lip – ‘biochemical changes’ – and are forbidden from scratching our faces at all, even when we are not meditating. The difficulty, of course, is that as soon as one tickle realises you are letting him live, he whistles for all his friends. I picture them as tiny flies with multicoloured legs and fiery backs. I become practised at keeping five or six hanging off my face all at once. And then comes the day I have been worrying about. Then comes day six.

  We were warned what would happen the evening before. Goenka informed us that we would henceforth be required to undertake three daily sessions of adhitthana – hour-long ‘sittings of serious determination’ – during which we are forbidden from moving at all. He went on to counsel us: ‘It is very likely that one will encounter gross, solidified, intensified, unpleasant sensations. You have encountered such experiences in the past, but the habit pattern of your mind was to react. Now you’re learning to observe without reacting. Pain exists, misery exists. Crying will not free anyone of misery.’

  The first time I try, it hurts so much that I think I am going to vomit. Halfway through, someone walks out. I crack open my eyes to watch. I see only the material of his trousers as he passes – the places where his hands have been resting are wet. When it is finally over, and I push myself agonisingly to something approaching a standing position, I am almost surprised to see my legs looking normal. I was half expecting them to appear as they feel: swollen and twisted and bloody.

  It takes several attempts before I am finally able to achieve the full hour without any movement at all. When it is over, I come around with a sense of soaring but vulnerable elation. I need hugs, congratulations. What I get is the teacher, unsmiling and distant at the front: ‘Take rest for five minutes and start again.’

  Lunch that day is edible. I think it is some kind of satay. I shovel in great, grateful spoonfuls of it, staring straight ahead, treat myself to two cups of rainwater and then head off to my clearing to be alone. On arrival, I begin urinating through the fence, as usual. Gazing blandly at my penis in action, I find myself repeating one of Goenka’s favourite catchphrases in a loop: ‘It rises, it passes away. It rises, it passes away.’ Behind me, fearsomely close, there are footsteps. I freeze. They pause, then pass by. I take a moment. I zip up my fly and retrace the stranger’s passage. I have no idea who that was, but there is no way that they did not hear me and see what I was doing. I go back to my room. There is another fly in there. I take my printouts and roll them up and smash it dead, dead, dead against the window.

  Over the last few days my tinnitus, which is always with me, has worsened dramatically. Last night, as I lay in bed, I could make out five separate tones, five mechanical cries, five blue lasers of searing din firing from somewhere in my cochleae to the deep interior of my brain. It is a sound that I cannot separate from the years that I was tortured by my own mind; the awful seasons of my second madness.

  For reasons that still confuse me, from that day in the Scout tent to the evening when I began my relationship with the woman I would one day marry, I lived my life in a mode of almost constant romantic dereliction. Again and again, as a teenager I would fall into a powerful state of love that would always go unrequited. When, finally, I persuaded someone to go out with me, I was seventeen, she was fifteen, and we lasted for more than two years. I loved Jenny so much that I felt as if I couldn’t physically contain it. I became fixated with boys she had kissed before me. I made her tell me about them, about what happened, about what exactly happened, over and over and over again. So that’s all that happened? Nothing else? Are you sure? I became paranoid. Because she was so beautiful, you see, and every man out there was a dangerous rival and how could I compet
e with any of them? From waking to sleeping, I could think about almost nothing else. I became obsessed. I became intolerable.

  And so, one afternoon in her bedroom, Jenny tried to leave me. I dug my thumbnail into my wrist with such force that it broke the skin. I had a kind of blackout. The next thing I knew, a lot of time had passed and my mother had arrived in her car. She had been called because I was incapable of catching the train home alone.

  This behaviour, this madness, was to repeat itself again and again throughout my twenties. I was tormented by paranoia and jealousy and this feeling that love was an awful and gigantic magic, a black spider spinning rope around my heart until it crushed. I soon found that the most efficient tool for hammering the heart back together was the decibel. I came to rely on music. I found that it induced a kind of hypnotism through which the song and the hurt became indistinguishable. The music meshed with the pain and then it lifted it from me; it took its weight. And the louder the volume was, the greater the effect. Today, like a detuned radio picking up the distant echo of the big bang, I can still hear the noise of all that dead love. And I consider it only right and proper that it sounds like a scream.

  In my dim and lonely room in the Blue Mountains, I sit on my bed, listening to my brain damage and examining the small scar on my wrist. I think about my madness and recall that my preferred band during the Jenny years were The Afghan Whigs – well known in the 1990s for exploring themes of guilt and self-loathing. I remember lines of one favourite song: ‘Hear me now and don’t forget, I’m not the man my actions would suggest. A little boy, I’m tied to you, I fell apart, that’s what I always do.’ Suddenly, it all seems relevant again.

  I push myself to standing and leave the room. Walking to the pagoda, I am approached by one of the assistants. ‘The teacher. He wants to see you.’ He hands me a small white piece of paper. On it, written in pencil, are the words: WILLIAM STORR. I become frantic. This is it. I am going to be thrown out.

  When my appointment finally arrives, I am let into a room to find the teacher waiting for me, lotus style, on a podium. I kneel obediently before him. He is British, perhaps sixty years old and has the expression of a man who has just discovered that all the raisins have been stolen from his muesli.

  ‘I was just wondering how you were getting along,’ he says.

  ‘Fine … ?’ I say.

  ‘You seemed a little distracted this morning.’

  ‘Did I?’ I say. ‘I don’t think I was.’

  He says nothing. Then he smiles. I feel a powerful pressure beneath my eyes.

  ‘I am finding all this – ’ I look away – ‘incredibly, incredibly hard.’

  ‘A lot of people say it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘Do you have anything you would like to ask me about your practice?’

  I pause, nervously.

  ‘These sankaras,’ I say. ‘I’m finding it … I just … How do you know they’re real?’

  ‘We have this obsession with proving everything in the West,’ he says. ‘The proof will be, does it work? Does it change your behaviour?’

  ‘I also wanted to ask about this anapana – this process of pus coming out. Because things have been coming out. I thought I had forgotten about them a long time ago. It’s been difficult for me.’

  I look up at him hopefully.

  ‘Those are your demons,’ he says. ‘You’re going to have to deal with them.’

  He nods again and smiles broadly. My time is over. I leave the room drunk with elation. In that moment, I really don’t believe that I have ever been so happy. I felt as if I could follow my teacher anywhere.

  *

  It is the evening of day eight and she cannot stop crying. We have just had that terrifying moment, at the top of the adhitthana, the worst one, when the reassuring murmur of the air conditioning rattles and halts and gives way to a menacing silence and there is a woman at the back and she is sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. And we sit here, us compassionate Buddhists, and we listen to her falling apart. I should go to help. I would usually go to help. She is only over there. Why am I not moving? Because it is forbidden. There is nothing between me and her but empty air, no one to stop me but my teacher who is up there on the podium and yet, and yet …

  After five minutes, she is taken outside. She starts screaming.

  That night, after the curfew, I pull on my coat and my woolly hat and dig out my $50 and I walk back along the dark road until I reach the light of the town. I find a table for one in a crowded Italian restaurant and I eat a large meat-scattered pizza. I use some of the change to telephone my partner, Farrah, from a call-box on a Blackheath station platform. I tell her that I love her and that I want to come home. A taxi drops me back at the compound, a hundred yards from the entrance. I sneak along the bushes and tip-toe back to my room. By the time of the 4 a.m. gong the next morning, my perfectly maintained holy sila is lying spent, in a crusty tissue that I have tossed on the floor and in the swell of my dough-stuffed belly. Bong! Bong! Bong! I turn over in my bed. I go straight back to sleep.

  *

  ‘I’m not the man my actions would suggest.’ The lyric is effective, because the plea it contains is not true. We are what we do, no matter how desperately we might try to insist otherwise. When I was a boy, despite my trying so hard, I would regularly steal – crisps from cupboards, pens from classmates, money from purses. My parents would catch me, again and again. I would have done anything not to be a thief any more. But something kept happening; some force would take me over. It was as if I would temporarily become another person. And then, the moment that the sin was committed, I would beg of myself, ‘Why did you do it? Why can’t you stop?’ It was the same when I was older and buried within the ropes of paranoid jealousy, and again when I developed an alcohol problem. During my years of madness, all of my actions suggested that I was a bad man; that I was, in some elementary way, wrong.

  I felt these feelings return when I failed to assist the crying woman. It was as if I was not in control of my own actions. Throughout my battles in love, theft and drinking I came to know all too well that feeling of reason, of will, of better information, failing to influence my actions. And in the midst of it all, I always knew that I was being mad; inhuman. That is not how humans behave. We are in control of ourselves. We are not victim to convenient ‘invisible forces’. We are one single person, with one set of values and one gallery of beliefs about the world. We are rational. We take in information about the world, we judge its worth and adjust our behaviour accordingly. We are agents of reason.

  Everything we know about people tells us that this is so. It is this quality that elevates us above animals. It is the predicate upon which we evaluate the moral worth of other people. It is the basis of our legal system of judgement and punishment. But, as I kneeled in that pagoda, all of that seemed to break down. I wanted to go over there. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Some devil overcame me. And I began to wonder, is it like this for other people?

  Then I read about the events that spiralled from a single phone call to a Kentucky branch of McDonald’s on 9 April 2004, and I discovered that it is.

  *

  It rang sometime after 5 p.m. and Donna Summers, the assistant manager, picked up the receiver. Straight away, she knew it was important. ‘I’m a police officer. My name is Officer Scott,’ said the caller. ‘I’ve got McDonald’s corporate on the line here, and the store manager. We have reason to believe that one of your employees – you know: young, small, dark hair – has stolen the purse of a customer. Do you know who I’m talking about?’

  Summers knew who it sounded like – Louise Ogborn, the pretty eighteen-year-old who was working to support her family after her mother had fallen ill and lost her job. Officer Scott confirmed that it was indeed Louise and instructed Summers to fetch her, empty her pockets and confiscate her purse and car keys. She would then be required to perform a thorough search of the suspect. When Louise – a former Girl Scout and regular church attende
e – was informed of what was about to happen, she began to cry. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said. ‘I’ve been out there, working. You can ask anyone. I couldn’t steal!’ Summers instructed Louise to remove one item of clothing at a time and examined each as it was passed to her. When Louise was naked, Summers took the bagged garments outside, ready for collection by Officer Scott’s colleagues, who would be arriving soon.

  Louise had been detained, wearing nothing but a dirty apron, for more than an hour when Summers told the policeman that she had to get back to work. ‘The problem is we’re currently having Louise’s home searched for drugs,’ said Officer Scott. ‘Do you have, say, a husband who can watch her for the time being?’ Summers did not. But she did have a fiancé.

  Soon afterwards, her partner Walter Nix Jr. – a churchgoer and youth basketball coach – dutifully arrived to guard Louise. Nix took the phone and followed Officer Scott’s instructions precisely. He made Louise dance with her hands in the air to see if any stolen goods would ‘shake out’. He made her open out her vaginal cavity with her fingers, in case anything was hidden in there. He made her turn around and touch her toes, stand on a desk. He made her kiss him, so he could check for alcohol on her breath. When she refused to call Nix ‘sir’, Officer Scott demanded she be reprimanded with a spanking. Nix did just that, for more than ten minutes. Two and a half hours after the initial phone call, Louise was on her knees, tearfully performing fellatio. It only occurred to any of them that Officer Scott might be a hoaxer when the branch’s fifty-eight-year-old odd-job man became suspicious. He refused to take over, despite being reassured by Summers that the whole thing had been ‘approved by corporate’.

  Walter Nix Jr. has been described by a friend as ‘a great community guy … a great role model for kids’ who ‘had never even had a ticket’. When he drove home, later that night, he telephoned his best friend. He told him, ‘I have done something terribly bad.’