A winter night in the Blue Mountains, 140 kilometres west, 1,065 metres above and many degrees of strangeness removed from the glories of Sydney, Australia. When the slow train that winds up the valley finally drops me off, I am surprised to discover that the compound I am heading for is a long hike out of the village of Blackheath. The road is narrow, empty and lined with tall trees that have become a gigantic wall of shifting shadows in the dark. I have never liked the Blue Mountains. Tourists seem to enjoy its views and its tearooms and its rainy, isolated towns, but whenever I have visited, it has always seemed to me to be an uneasy place, of bad memories, freezing mists and general human weirdness. You hear rumours of unkind people taking refuge among its epic forests, of suicides and dying walkers and long-ago massacres of Aboriginal tribes.
This is why, as I shuffle alone and slightly afraid up this unlit path, I am warmly anticipating the glad reception that will no doubt greet me when I arrive at the Vipassana Meditation Centre. Tonight, there is to be a welcome dinner and a get-to-know-you session and tomorrow will begin ten days of soothing and absolute silence. It is to be a retreat during which we will learn what is perhaps the world’s most ancient form of Buddhist meditation. This, it is claimed, is the method perfected by Gotama the Buddha himself more than two and a half thousand years ago. Other varieties serve to focus the mind with the use of counting, mantras or visualisation, but these practices are dismissed by Vipassana teachers as crude ‘concentration techniques’. Vipassana is not concerned with childish ‘blissed-out states’, but with moral and psychological purification. By observing ‘the changing nature of body and mind’ we will perform a ‘deep, deep operation on the brain’ and thereby ‘experience the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness, penetrating ever subtler layers of mind until we reach the source of our misery.’ And when we are done, in about a week and a half’s time, happiness is going to follow us ‘like a shadow.’
Unlike past-life regression, there is plenty of sound evidence for the efficacy of meditation. Like PLR, though, it does come shrink-wrapped with some strange beliefs – about reincarnation, for example, and karma and the universe consisting of thirty-one levels, one of which is inhabited solely by giants. Although it seemed to me that what tangible effects PLR had were likely to be a product of the placebo effect, I would be being unfair to Vered Kilstein if I was to dismiss all of her healing powers as accidental. She was, I thought, an analyst of genuine talent. When, after only a few minutes of talk, she asked me if there exist any wealthy people who have achieved success in honourable ways, I replied, ‘No.’ And in doing so I had revealed myself to hold an implicit belief that is every bit as prejudiced as the ones John Mackay had preached to the mild-mannered gay-haters of Gympie.
I experienced that nauseous, unmoored sensation again. There I had been, blithely assuming that the bigots were everywhere else and it had taken Vered less than ten minutes to demonstrate that I was one as well. Since meeting John Mackay, I have been mapping the wrongness of others, trying to track the trails of their cognitive errors back to some kind of source. But what about my beliefs, my wrongness? Doesn’t the position I hold, with my Dictaphone and my notepad and my ability to always have the last word, depend on operating from a safe position of known sanity? Isn’t that the assumption that I demand from you, the reader? Am I ‘sane’? If so, why is it that when I look back upon my life I all too frequently see the actions of a man who is anything but? It was time, I realised, for some humility and reflection and pause. And that is what I am hoping to find here.
I turn the corner, off the road, and rush through the darkness of the car park towards the welcoming light of the canteen. The room is bare and dirty-white and crammed with trestle tables and men. All between their early twenties and late forties; every ethnicity seems to be represented. There are sporty ones with tracksuits, straight backs and gelled hair; slumping city types fresh from work with their collar buttons undone; solitary, lumpy, middle-aged guys; and an original hippy with orange trousers and a hat that is unnecessarily tall. And there is an atmosphere I wasn’t expecting, too, of tension and of watching.
I walk to the registration desk, where a manager hands me a plastic ziplock bag. ‘Place your wallet and your mobile phone in here.’
I do as he requests. He says, ‘Do you have a mobile phone?’
‘It’s in the bag,’ I reply.
‘No other phones? You are forbidden from having a mobile phone on your person during the course.’
‘It’s in there!’ I say.
He looks at the bag warily, then back at me. He hands me a document, on which I have to provide details of my medical history and mental health and sign an agreement to say that I will abide by the ‘code of discipline’. I brush my eye over it quickly. There is something about remaining silent for the duration of the ten-day course and blah, blah, blah something about not killing anyone.
I sign on the line and wander over to collect my meal. I sit, eyeing my food carefully. I can’t work out exactly what it is – some lentil concoction.
‘First time?’ says the young man of Malaysian appearance sitting next to me.
I nod, forcing down a gobbet of green-grey sludge.
‘Are you nervous?’
‘No!’ I say. ‘Nervous?’
He nods at me, admiringly.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. ‘They say, by day eight you don’t really feel the pain any more. It’s like you’re separate from it.’
I put down my spoon.
‘Pain?’
But his attention has been taken by the arrival of a man at the front, who puts on an audio tape and instructs us all to listen. ‘Apparently,’ my dining partner just has time to add, ‘most people don’t last the first six days.’
From the cassette player, we hear a cold, aristocratic-sounding English voice. ‘You must agree to abide by the code of discipline,’ he says. ‘You must make a decision now that you will remain here for ten days. You must not leave the compound. To leave early could be harmful.’
I glance around at the drab walls, the closed doors, the lentil pot, the drinking urns marked RAINWATER and the sign saying DO NOT FACE THE FEMALE SIDE. There is something about this place … it just doesn’t seem like the blissful haven I was expecting. Vipassana, after all, is supposed to be an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. I look down, worriedly, at the document I have just signed.
‘WHAT VIPASSANA IS NOT: It is not an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life.’
Oh.
I turn the sheet and skim through the code of discipline. ‘The foundation of the practice is sila – moral conduct. Sila provides a basis for the development of Samadhi – the concentration of the mind. Purification of the mind is achieved though panna – the wisdom of insight.’
I note that I have agreed to abstain from killing any living creature, from stealing, from sexual activity, from telling lies and from taking intoxicants. And it is not your standard silence that I will be observing, it is a ‘Noble’ one – which means ‘silence of body, speech and mind. Any form of communication with fellow students, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes etc. is prohibited.’
I glance at the course timetable.
‘Morning wake-up bell – 4 a.m.’
Oh.
When the tape has finished, we are led through the shadowy compound to a large pagoda, where we kneel in rows on the concrete floor. The lights are low and we are reduced to anonymous, hunched black forms in the gloom. I steal a forbidden glance to my right, where I can make out thirty or so other lumps – presumably, these are the women from whom we are strictly segregated. On a low stage in front of us, a man and a woman are kneeling with closed eyes and perfect stillness, their heads just visible above huge blankets which cover their torsos and folded legs. It takes me a moment to work out what they are, whether they are real.
Once I have settled as best as I can on the dense rectangular cushion provided, a guttural moaning descends from above. It rolls and booms, magical and powerfully sacred, its impossible words petering out into long, drawn-out rumbles. When it is over, the voice – slow, rich, Indian-sounding – compels us to swear that we will stick to our promises (‘I will refrain from sleeping on luxurious, warm, high, cosy beds’) and warns us that we are here to perform a ‘deep, deep operation on the brain.’ ‘This is not about breath control,’ he says. ‘That is a discipline called pranayama. This is the complete opposite.’ He advises us to ‘Work hard, work seriously, work diligently, diligently, diligently.’ Certain ‘weak-minded’ people sometimes ask to leave on day six, he adds, before instructing us to focus all our attention on the sensation of breath entering and leaving our nasal passages. There is no mention of pain, there is only the insinuation of it in my hips and knees and ankles. ‘Resolve to remain for the entire period of the course, no matter what difficulties you may face,’ he orders finally, before slipping into another spooky, primordial chant.
When it is over, it takes me a minute or so to rub the ache from my muscles and joints. I head off, careful not to look at any of the other men, and find my small white room. It contains nothing but some coat hooks and a narrow bed. I don’t feel tired at all. What on earth can a lonely man do to fill a bit of time in a place such as this? I stand there, gazing through the open bathroom door at the roll of tissue paper hanging glumly from its holder in the low blue light.
No. It is forbidden.
I climb into my sleeping bag, zipping it all the way up so that my body is chastely separated from my hands and my right arm is distracted by the torch it is busy shining on some print-outs that I thought to bring with me. I read that this place was opened in 1983, is the second to be founded outside India and can accommodate a hundred and ten students, fifteen hundred of whom have their minds purified annually. The voice that boomed about us from above was that of Vipassana’s brain-excavator-in-chief Mr S. N. Goenka, who was born and raised in Myanmar. Once a wealthy businessman, he found the technique to be so wonderful that he devoted his life to it. Since settling in India in 1969, tens of thousands of people have completed the free courses that they offer at centres in Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, France, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Nepal.
The next thing that I hear is a gong bonging outside my door. It is ten minutes before 4 a.m. I dress haphazardly and shuffle up the dark track towards the pagoda. Aware of other shufflers around me, I keep my head down and my silence noble. Collecting as many cushions and blue blankets as I can carry, I move to my allocated spot on the concrete floor. I lay down a large, thin foam block and put two rectangular ones on top of that and use it as a sort of seat. As I sit, I can feel the pain from last night returning. It settles itself grumpily into my lower back and body as I wait for the teachers to arrive and begin the lesson. Five minutes. Ten minutes. At twelve minutes, I glance furtively around the huge hall. Everyone has their eyes closed. They are sitting straight and still, breathing, concentrating. Oh God. There are no more instructions. We have started. This is it. Between now and lights-out, I realise, I have to spend nearly eleven hours thinking about my nose.
I feel as if I have been bolted inside a coffin. The impossible distances of the hours ahead induce the wooziness of vertigo. Time, petulantly demanding to be filled, turns on me, becoming both gaoler and gaol. The energy that my body has amassed for the day ahead swells, as if from a geyser. There is too much of it. There is nowhere for it to go. I begin to rock very gently back and forth, in the way I used to, to comfort myself when I was a child. I take a series of deep breaths before remembering that, according to Vipassana lore, this is not sufficiently ‘real’ and therefore forbidden. I gird my spine and rearrange my ankles, which have become numb and sore, and try to empty my brain. I sneak a look at my watch.
Three minutes have passed.
Two endless hours later, we are finally released by the sound of a mournful gong. Blinking into the freezing mountain dawn and moving carefully with painful legs, I can make the compound out for the first time. It is a complex of single-storey accommodation blocks linked by dirt paths. The pagoda is on one end, on the other is the canteen, which is set in a beautiful Japanese garden with winter-bare trees and a wooden walkway over a pond that is inhabited by koi and invisibly ribbitting toads. I walk, obediently, with my head down, seeing only passing feet. I am starving.
I lift a tea-towel from a steel tray of toast. Each slice has only vague skid-marks of brown at its edges. I join the queue for the hot stuff and am spooned a ladle of grey porridge. A second helper adds a small dump of tinned prunes. It is a Buddhist breakfast indeed: entirely free of ambition, not desiring approval. I wander into the corner, swallow my food between mouthfuls of rainwater and wonder what I have got myself into. Why did I imagine it would be sensible for me to ‘penetrate ever subtler layers of mind?’ I am the last person … I mean, most of the time, when I think about my unconscious, I picture something angry, struggling to get out of a box.
And then, during the first afternoon session, something extraordinary happens. I catch glimpses of it, I think: hints and implications and strange visions that, I can only suppose, come from the mute parts of my brain – the secret regions that contain the invisible forces that produce belief in God and faith in aliens and the imagined biographies of all those John Lennons. I decide to pay strict attention. And in my struggling to stay awake during the process of going to sleep, I discover that I can watch my conscious mind falling into itself.
When my eyes have been shut for a few moments, my thoughts are just the usual nagging parade of recent memories and worries about the future. Then I start to notice the patterns behind my eyes. The longer I look, the more the monotone smudges take on crystal Technicolor form. Sometimes they appear to reflect what is going on externally; a tickle on my cheek will become a sliding wall of millions of laughing cartoon mouths. At other times they are gloopy, cut-out movies of whatever memory I am replaying. I will see faces from my past, images of places and irrelevant events. My internal monologue warps and switches. At one stage it turns French, saying, ‘Continuez, continuez.’ Then I hear a woman repeating ‘Lamb’s fry’ in a whispering monotone. The breath deepens. I see a dog’s back, a pair of female lips, an ocean wave and I assume this to be the outer atmospheres of the unconscious, because it is at this point that the devils of sleep add their enchanted cornflour and everything thickens into a proper dream. I see the start of a television commercial for a new Ford SUV. It spins on a revolving podium, its unlikely brand-name spelled out in glorious sparkling letters: MIND. My spine relaxes, my jaw sags and I snap awake just in time to save my body collapsing onto the concrete floor. Then I look at my watch – three or four minutes have usually passed – I shuffle my aching legs and begin it all again.
Over the next few days, the contents of these visions begin to worry me. The 4 a.m. wake-ups pull me out of some subterranean phase of sleep so abruptly that I can remember vivid details of my dream. One morning, I am walking in a red-light district when I see a girl who I know and love but who does not love me. ‘I’m a prostitute,’ she says. I ask her hopefully, ‘Does that mean I can sleep with you?’ She looks sorry for me, but resigned. ‘I suppose so,’ she sighs. ‘It’s £30.’ During the mediation sessions, at the point just before I dissolve into unconsciousness and bolt myself awake, I begin to see the faces of women that I loved long ago. Sometimes it is a glimpse of a bare shoulder that I haven’t seen for years. Sometimes it is a detail of a face or a length of hair. Sometimes they turn to face me and smile. Always, they make me feel sad.
My first memory of being in love is lying alone in a tent on a hot summer’s day, feeling so scared and sick with dreadful emotion that I couldn’t move. It was during a Scout camp. I was twelve years old and in the teeth of some invisible force that I couldn’t understand. That was the beginning of what I would one day come to think of as my second madness.
*
The pain of Vipassana is not merely one of memory. As the ache of one day builds on top of the next, I begin to find it impossible to kneel upright for more than ten minutes. No matter how carefully I engineer my structure of cushions and blankets, I find no escape: the concrete beneath the padding always punches through. It begins, at the start of a session, as aches in my shins, ankles and the tops of my feet and then spreads and merges to form great tracts of agony, while my back – which, along with my head, must remain straight – hurts in such a way that I keep imagining that it has daggers of wood sticking out of it.
Equally unpleasant is the disorientation of being lost in time. The desperation for the session to end is such that I lose faith in my body-clock. After what seems to be a long period of shuffling and rubbing-away of pain, there always comes a terrible moment when I realise that half an age has passed and I have twice as long to go. And it is still not over, and it is still not over, and it is still not over … I come to hate the sound of the air conditioning shutting off at the beginning of a session, and the resulting silence. I dread it as if it is the closing of a prison door.
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 compete 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 attendee – 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.’
This was not an isolated incident. Similar incidents had been occurring for years. Ultimately, the scam was pulled in more than seventy restaurants across the United States.
‘The point is that this did not happen occasionally,’ Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, tells me. ‘If it happened just once or twice, you’d say, “Gee, how dumb are these people? How gullible?” But it worked most of the time. The scenario that was created was so compelling that people got trapped in it.’
Zimbardo served as an expert witness in one of the trials that related to the so-called ‘strip-search scams’. He was called because, back in the 1970s, he had become an authority on the invisible processes which compel good people to do bad things when he carried out a study that remains darkly notorious among students of the psychology of evil. In an attempt to examine the effects of prison life on ordinary individuals, Zimbardo created a mock gaol on the grounds of his university and recruited the twelve most ‘normal and healthy’ young men from a cohort of seventy-five applicants. ‘We randomly assigned half to be guards and half to be prisoners,’ he recalls. ‘I had to end it in six days because it was out of control. Normal healthy college students were having emotional breakdowns. Five of them had to be released early because of the cruelty and sadism of the guards towards them. It demonstrated in a powerful way how situations can overwhelm the best and the brightest.’
The Stanford Prison Experiment is a legendary study in the realm of what became known as ‘situational psychology’. It helped to reveal a terrible flaw in the way humans typically view themselves. We tend to assume that we are in control of ourselves; that inner forces such as character and conscience captain our actions and define our behaviour. But the work of Zimbardo revealed the hitherto unimaginable power of outside forces to affect us. ‘My research and the research of many social psychologists has demonstrated very powerfully that people can be corrupted into behaving in evil ways, often without the awareness of the power of the situation that they find themselves in.’
According to Zimbardo, there is a kind of recipe for creating evil. ‘How did evil come about during the prison experiment?’ he asks. ‘It was people playing a role. You’re assigned a role as a guard, a prisoner, a teacher or a military trainer – any of the roles we play in life. Although you start off thinking those roles are arbitrary and not the real you, as you live them, they become you. The second thing is the power of the group. You’re a guard but you’re in a cadre of other guards, so you put pressure on each other to be tough. Groups can have powerful influences on individual behaviour. Our guards were in uniform and they wore sunglasses to conceal their eyes. We call that de-individuation. You take away somebody’s individuality. You make them anonymous. The next process is called dehumanisation, where you begin to think of other people as different from you and then as different from your kind and kin, and then as less than human. You take away their humanity. Once you do that, you can do anything to them – harm, hurt, torture, rape, kill. These were the basic processes operating in the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which I studied at length because I was an expert witness for one of the guards.’
Of course, generating evil was not the intent of the Buddhists at the Vipassana centre in Blackheath. All the people who attend their courses do so voluntarily and a number of those present were returnees who evidently received huge benefit from their practice. When I look back upon my days there, I realise now that, psychologically speaking, I was unprepared, under-researched and weak. Really, I should never have gone. But listening to Zimbardo, I cannot help but wonder if situational forces had an accidental impact on my inability, despite myself, to stand up and attend to the screaming woman. Perhaps it was the role I had taken on, as serious, studious Buddhist; the pressure of the group to conform; the anonymity of the darkness and the prohibition against communicating with anyone. If so, I believe that there was also another powerful engine in play. When Louise Ogborn was asked in court why she did not simply leave the room in which she was being abused, she replied, ‘I was scared, because they were a higher authority to me.’ It was the same reason why her assistant manager and her fiancé behaved as they did. They believed that they were being instructed by someone senior to them.
‘Excessive obedience’ to authority is a flaw in humans that has been known to social psychologists for a long time. This is, in part, due to a set of extremely famous experiments carried out by Professor Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961, during which it was discovered that two-thirds of participants were prepared to deliver potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers, simply because they had been told to do so by a man in a white coat.
We are invisibly influenced not only by those in authority, but by those who populate our work and social lives. In a 2012 paper, neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith reviews a trove of well-replicated studies that demonstrate how, when we are in the company of others, we can automatically switch from ‘I mode’ to ‘we mode’. ‘We can’t help taking into account the views of others,’ he writes. ‘The brain creates the illusion that we are all independent entities who make our own decisions. In reality there are powerful unconscious processes that embed us in the social world. We tend to imitate others and share their goals, knowledge and beliefs, but we are hardly aware of this. This is why strange narratives work best when they are shared by a group.’
In 1951, Professor Stanley Milgram’s boss, Dr Solomon Asch, conducted a simple but devastating test that explored the ease by which we can let the opinions of others affect our own. He showed a hundred and twenty-three participants a series of two simple straight lines and asked them to say whether the first was longer, shorter or the same length as the second. Each person was in a group of eight and, initially, everything was easy. As you would expect, most of the time everyone gave the same answer: the same, longer, shorter, shorter, longer, the same, and so on. But gradually, for one person in the group, everything turned weird. Because all the others began to give answers that were wrong. What Asch wanted to know was this: when it came to their turn, what would that one person do? Go their own way and give the right answer? Or copy all the others?
This was a test to see if pressure from the group (who were actually actors) could compel individuals to defy the evidence of their own eyes. Asch found that around 70 per cent of people did just that. But as amazing and troubling as that finding was, it failed to answer a critical question: did the opinions of others simply intimidate the participant into calling it wrong? Or was his finding evidence of another, infinitely stranger hypothesis? That the group changed how the person actually perceived the line? It is a radical idea. Can it really be true? Can the view of the many actually change the world of the one?
It took the development of some advanced technologies before the tantalising beginnings of an answer could be sensed. In 2005, Dr Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, conducted a test based on Asch’s lines, which involved judging the ‘sameness’ of various objects while under social pressure to give the wrong answer. This time, however, the participants were in an fMRI scanner, having their brain activity recorded.
In Berns’s study, people bowed to peer pressure 41 per cent of the time. But did they make a conscious decision to lie? Or were they somehow pressured into actually seeing the wrong answer? Were the situational forces so great that they altered their perception of reality? Checking the fMRI data, Berns’s team found that in the moments prior to a participant giving their answer, there was no corresponding activity in areas of the brain that are associated with conscious decision- making. And yet there was corresponding activity in the area which is involved in the judging of spatial awareness. To put it simply, when these people were considering their response, it seemed as if they were not analysing their opinion, but seeing it.
Before we leap too high for our conclusion, it must be pointed out that there has recently been a significant backlash in scientific circles against inappropriate levels of confidence in the kinds of things that fMRI scans can tell us. But if further research reinforces these findings, the implications will be weird and dazzling. In an interview with the New York Times after his paper was published, Berns said, ‘We like to think that seeing is believing, but the study’s findings show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.’ In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo writes that this test ‘calls into question the nature of truth itself.’
*
They are everywhere, these invisible forces. In the effects of placebo, in the power of authority figures, in the awful physics of the situations that can push us silently into evil. What connects them seems to be some species of illusion. It tells us that these forces do not exist, that we are in control of who we are, what we do and how we think. Having spent ten days being menaced by proximity to my unconscious, it is clear where I now have to lead my search – to the place where all these forces work their magic, and where so many discomforting illusions are summoned. The brain.