Dissecting Dharma: Ten Days of Silence

Everyone who knows me even slightly knows that I've perpetually led

a confused existence.

Not the philosophical kind of confusion one can romanticise. A

practically boring, permanently disillusioned, what exactly am I

doing with my life kind.

For a long time I had been considering going for a Vipassana

meditation retreat. Ten days away from the world. No phones. No

communication. No talking. Just sitting about and boring your mind

into a stupor and observing whatever truths decide to show up.

Several people I tend to respect as beings of comparable or even

superior intellect had described the experience as life-changing.

Not the sort of people who'd blindly believe every fad social media

throws at them. Competent, think-for-yourself, kind of wise humans.

Suffice to say, I was curious. Heavens know, I could do with some

life-changing meditation mumbo-jumbo.

So after months of planning, I finally went for the ten-day course

and managed to complete it. Must report that the experience was... cerebral.

Nothing mystical or magical. No. But intensely and uncomfortably

mental.

Of course, I've returned exactly as confused as I was before.

Vipassana is no magic pill. Though perhaps, I'm now slightly more

aware of how that confusion works. And that seems a little like

progress to me.

What They're Actually Selling

Vipassana is described by its teachers as an ancient Indian

meditation practice rediscovered by Gautam Buddha over 2,500 years

ago, preserved through a lineage of teachers, and eventually spread

through the work of Mr S. N. Goenka. Whether one takes that story

literally or as the tradition's founding narrative is a matter of

personal interpretation. I'll leave that one with you.

The course itself is pretty straightforward. And I must admit, much

more thoughtfully designed than I'd have anticipated, given that the

target audience seems to be the spiritually-inclined lost souls,

tired of fake godmen selling salvation while building their own

little empires. Mr Goenka, I must admit, was a very intelligent man.

Participants spend ten days observing sensations in their bodies

while trying to maintain equanimity. The central idea, drilled in

daily, is simple: our suffering comes from constantly reacting to

sensations. We crave pleasant ones and resist unpleasant ones.

Vipassana trains you to simply watch without reacting. One principle

gets repeated so much that it starts sounding like the background

hum of the place: anitya, meaning ever-changing. Sensations are

ever-changing. For example, if you feel pain, you'd hope it gets

better. And it might. Or it might grow worse over time. But it will

definitely not stay how it was when first observed.

Impermanence is the lesson. And it goes deeper than physical

discomfort. Goenka's argument is that emotions are sensations too.

They arise in the body. They demand a reaction. And we almost always

oblige.

The philosophy goes further into ideas about liberation, cycles of

rebirth, and the ultimate cessation of suffering. These bits I'm

having to process with a modest pinch of salt.

In the Vipassana framework, what they call Dharma, or rather Shuddh

Dharm, simply means the law of nature. Fire burns. Ice cools.

Gravity pulls things downward. Nothing you say, believe, or donate

to any institution can change their nature. Similarly, the teacher

explains, sensations arise and pass according to natural law. The

entire practice is about observing this process firsthand, and not

theorising about it. For the spiritual seeker, this is purified

Dharma at its most distilled. A boot camp to monkhood essentially,

conducted in ten-day batches for ordinary people who have a day job

to return to.

This focus extends to how the organisation operates. They run

meditation courses. They build meditation centres. They teach

meditation. You will not find them feeding the hungry or clothing

the needy anytime soon. This is not indifference. Their conviction

is that sharing this technique is the most valuable contribution one

can make to society. Dharma daan, the donation of dharma, is in

their framework the highest form of giving. Whether you agree with

that philosophy is up to you. But their clarity of purpose is hard

to argue with.

The Emotions We Think We Don't Control

Goenka's point, stated plainly, is that we are not passive

recipients of our emotions. We construct them, moment to moment,

from ingredients we are rarely conscious of. He illustrated this

with an example I haven't been able to shake.

You are walking down a street at night. Someone is sleeping on the

footpath. You accidentally bump into them. They wake up and lash out

at you.

Now he runs the same scenario, changing a detail or two each time.

When a companion bumps into the sleeping person rather than you, you

feel very little. A mild observation, perhaps, that they could have

been more careful. No real charge to it.

When you bump into them alone, the sting is to the ego. But there

are no witnesses, so you absorb it quietly. What's done is done.

Now he brings in the two variables that make things complicated. The

person you bumped into is your son. And your friends were present

when he lashed out at you.

Consider those two dimensions separately first. If it is your son,

alone, the words hit differently. There is anger, yes. But beneath

it, grief. That your relationship with your own child has arrived at

a place where he can speak to you this way, without a moment's

hesitation, without registering that you are his father.

If it is a stranger, but your friends were watching, the shame

multiplies. What must they think? Will they tell others?

Now put both together. Your son. Your friends present. He lashes out

at you in front of them, without flinching.

Same street. Same accidental bump. Same words spoken. And yet the

emotional experience of the last scenario carries the full weight of

ego, grief, and social shame simultaneously, each amplifying the

other.

The situation did not create those emotions. You did. From variables

you were not even consciously tracking.

This, Goenka argues, is why the instruction is to observe rather

than suppress or act upon. Suppression pushes the emotion

underground where it accumulates and waits. Acting upon it hands the

steering wheel to the sensation itself. Observation, the difficult

third option, means feeling the emotion fully, watching it arise in

the body, and letting it run its course without either burying it or

being driven by it. Deprived of your reaction, it loses its charge.

Not always immediately. But over time, the grip loosens.

The body scanning then, is not really about the body after all.

The Place, and What It Costs You

The centre where I attended is called Dhamma Banga, located near

Sonarpur on the outskirts of Kolkata. It is part of a global network

of over 200 Vipassana centres. The commute took me roughly an hour.

The entire one-way journey by public transport cost a princely sum

of thirty-five rupees. Anyone from Kolkata can reach it by local

train to Baruipur, followed by a short auto ride from the station.

Which leads to the part that genuinely intrigues me. The retreat

itself is free. No course fee, accommodation charges, food charges,

or any hidden charges whatsoever. Everything runs entirely on

donations from people who previously completed a course and found it

helpful. More interestingly, first-time participants are not even

allowed to donate until after they finish the ten days. Only once

you've completed the course are you given the option to contribute.

No compulsion. No fixed amount. They don't even talk about it enough

to guilt-trip you into donating.

That framing changes something quietly in you, even before the

meditation begins.

I could have done the entire experiment for under a hundred rupees.

However, I did choose to make a minor donation afterwards because I

felt I derived value from it. Someone before me had already paid for

my stay. My donation paid for whoever came next.

Before the course starts, you deposit your phone, wallet, and

valuables. What you're left with is your clothes and the bare

necessities. They hand you a plate, a tumbler, and a spoon. You wash

them yourself after every meal. You keep your room clean. You

maintain your own space. The centre provides a place to sleep

(single or at most double-occupancy rooms), and feeds you whatever

is cooked that day (basic vegetarian fare).

You are, in the most literal sense, living on someone else's

generosity.

Comfortable, yes. But most definitely not a hotel. Everything about

the setup reinforces what the course is trying to teach: temporary

asceticism, reduction of self, removal of the noise that normally

passes for a life. Whether or not you buy into the metaphysics, the

environment does its job efficiently. The centre itself is beautiful, even in its current unfinished

state. Surrounded on all sides by guava orchards, and no matter how

a poet might frame it, when the fruit is ripening the smell is

neither faint, nor charming. It is absolutely overwhelming. Every

time I walked near an orchard I found myself desperately craving a

guava. Ten days of practising non-attachment while craving guavas

just barely out of reach is, I will admit, its own kind of lesson.

The area is also decent birding territory, which I was perhaps more

excited about than appropriate for the spiritually inclined. From

the campus I spotted two species each of woodpeckers & kingfishers,

multiple types of herons & egrets, and several birds of prey, a

hovering black-shouldered kite among them. A nightjar and a family

of waterhens lived permanently near the accommodation block, right

outside my window. Their calls at night are dramatic enough to

unsettle people unfamiliar with them. I, of course, was delighted.

The rooms are new and clean, each with an attached bathroom and its

own geyser. Avoid visiting in summer though. Sitting in meditation

for ten hours a day is challenging enough without adding Kolkata

heat and humidity to the equation.

The Voice in the Room

Every evening, participants listen to recorded discourses by Mr

Goenka. There is also a fair amount of chanting throughout the

sessions.

Mr Goenka had a distinctive singing style. He would stretch words

indefinitely, break syllables into unexpected rhythms, and sustain

sounds with great theatrical authority. To say I found it mildly

infuriating for the first few days would be a bit of an

understatement.

But then something shifted. After several days of sustained

meditation, the mind becomes unusually sensitive to sound. By the

later days of the retreat, you are not just hearing the chanting.

You are feeling it. Sound, at its most fundamental, is vibration.

The skull, a resonant cavity. A mind that has spent dozens of hours

paying attention to sensation will naturally begin noticing how

those vibrations propagate through bone and tissue.

There is a concept in Indian tradition called beej mantra, or seed

sounds. Single syllables whose specific frequencies are said to

resonate with different parts of the body. The nasal resonant

sounds, the "ang" and "om" and "hum" endings, are particularly known

for this quality. The science behind the spiritual language is real:

certain frequencies create measurable physical resonance in the

cranial cavity and chest.

Mr Goenka ends his chants and discourses with a phrase repeated

three times: Bhavatu sabba mangalam. Roughly, a wish for the well-

being of all beings. By day seven, when the mind had become finely

tuned, the opening syllables of "bhavatu" would produce a faint

tingling across parts of my face. And the resonant "ang" of

"mangalam" would ring inside my head like a temple bell struck from

inside.

A very strange experience. Not mystical. Just a very attentive mind

noticing what sound actually does to the body.

The Built-in Irony

Three times every day there are sessions called adhisthan, where

participants sit for one hour without moving or opening their eyes.

The teaching throughout is that discomfort is impermanent. That

craving for relief is precisely what perpetuates suffering. That the

appropriate response to an aching back or a cramping leg is to

observe it without reacting.

This is all well and good until minute fifty-five of a sixty-minute

session.

At that point, somewhere in the accumulated mass of numbing legs and

negotiating spines, Mr Goenka's voice appears over the speakers,

chanting something in Pali about impermanence. One might not

understand the words, but every participant in that hall knows

exactly what they indicate.

The hour is almost over. Release is coming.

Despite ten days of being taught not to crave, the craving for that

moment is absolute.

Intentional irony perhaps. Or simply proof that the lesson is harder

than it sounds.

What the Mind Does When It Has Nowhere to Hide

After a few days of silence, you realise that the real experiment is

not the meditation technique. The real experiment is watching what

your mind does when it runs out of distractions.

At first it resists. Then it starts to wander. Finally, at some

point, it starts going through its own drawers: replaying patterns,

dressing up & presenting old ambitions as fresh plans, and bringing

to the surface anxieties you thought you'd dealt with. Also, for

anyone who wants an honest account rather than a sanitised one:

desires of every variety. Sexual thoughts are probably among the

first to surface when all external stimulation is removed. Not a

malfunction. Hopefully. When you strip away phones, conversation,

novelty, and entertainment, the mind replays whatever material it

has stored most deeply. The retreat does not eliminate these

impulses. It simply makes you watch them without immediately acting.

Which, depending on what you find, is either highly illuminating or

deeply uncomfortable.

For me, it was unsurprisingly both. The mind is not subtle about

what it has been sitting on.

And here is what the footpath example makes clear in hindsight:

those surfacing emotions were not random noise. They were the

material the practice was designed for all along.

Day Eight

This was the hardest day. And in hindsight, the most interesting.

I woke that morning from a nightmare about a close friend. One of

those dreams that leaves behind a specific, settled grief rather

than immediate panic. I knew it was a dream. But it sat underneath

everything that day like weather. In the residual fog, the focus I'd

occasionally managed in earlier sessions refused to appear. I found

myself doing exactly what the practice warns against. Chasing an

experience I'd had before and couldn't recreate, and then getting

frustrated by its absence. The mind will surface what it's been

carrying. And it does not always announce itself politely.

By day eight the mind has also made a small calculation: two more

days. The finish line is visible. And having understood the rules of

the game, you begin mentally packing your bags while your body is

still sitting in a meditation hall.

I found myself wondering whether I had already extracted whatever

this experience was going to offer and was simply going through the

motions. There is no one to ask. The teachers discourage

philosophical tangents. The recordings don't cover existential doubt

about the exercise itself.

But then the evening came. And something else happened entirely.

The Body Surprises You

Until that point I had been sitting slightly hunched. You are

encouraged to sit upright of course, but also to sit comfortably,

and upright would begin hurting within minutes. During one long

evening session I found myself running a kind of mental scan along

the length of my spine. Not as a technique, more as a curious

investigation of something I'd never paid much attention to before.

What followed was slow and strange. Moving attention along each

section of the spine, I could sense where it was holding, where

years of desk posture and accumulated tension had quietly calcified

into what I'd simply accepted as normal. Each time I stayed with a

point of tightness without forcing anything, without trying to fix

it, just observing it the way the practice had been teaching me to

observe everything else, something would shift. A small release.

Then another. Over thirty or forty minutes, the spine gradually

straightened of its own accord. The pain did not so much disappear

as simply stop being necessary.

For the rest of the retreat and a few days after, my back remained

completely upright without discomfort. For the first time in years

probably.

Later that night in my room I did something similar across my entire

body. Anywhere I could detect accumulated tension, I worked through

it the same way. Slowly, without force, just attention. By the time

I finished I felt as though I'd received the best deep tissue

massage imaginable. I slept like a baby that night.

Not mystical. Not mumbo jumbo. Simply something that happens when

you give sustained, undistracted attention to a body you normally

treat as transport. The same principle as the emotions, as it turns

out. Observe without reacting, and the thing being observed begins

to release its grip.

I also discovered at some point in the retreat that I can now detect

my own heartbeat with very little effort. Before this course I could

barely remember which side of my chest the heart was on. I've

returned, a slightly useless mini version of Dr Strange, with this

minor superpower available to me at all times.

Note to self: Everything is impermanent. Keep ego in check.

The Earthquake

During one session there was a minor earthquake.

In a meditative state, the initial sensation felt internal. Then the

reactions of the people around me clarified what was happening.

Approximately twenty participants in that hall responded in

approximately twenty different ways.

Some broke noble silence immediately. "Bhukamp! Bhukamp!" they

whispered loudly, voices hoarse from days of disuse, as though their

throats had forgotten how to shout.

Some stood up. Some moved toward the exits.

Someone opened his eyes, surveyed the room, assessed the situation,

and closed his eyes again.

Another never opened his eyes at all.

Ever practical, my own first response was to gauge the magnitude.

Clearly not enough to bring the building down. My second response

was an unexpected and fairly strong impulse to calm the people

standing about, looking around in confusion. I gestured at a few of

them to sit down. Whether they understood or simply considered me an

idiot as they ran out anyway, I cannot tell.

The involvement level of each participant was visible in that one

moment more clearly than in ten days of quiet observation.

Evidently, a meditation hall during an earthquake becomes a

perfectly good lab to observe human behaviour.

The Ego Reset

After nine days of complete disconnect, on the tenth day,

participants are allowed to speak and retrieve their valuables. A

day to decompress before the world rushes back in. The first thing most people do is call home.

I did the same. And a quiet, obvious realisation settled in.

The world had continued functioning perfectly well without me.

No crisis. No emergencies requiring my presence. Life had simply

proceeded. Ten days off-grid, and nothing had waited for me.

A surprisingly effective way to renegotiate your sense of your own

importance.

So Is It Worth Trying?

Definitely. Everyone should try this at least once.

Is it easy? No. Will it solve your life? Of course not. Will it hand

you clarity or answers? Highly unlikely. At least, not immediately.

Ten uninterrupted days of watching your own mind without anywhere to

hide. That is what you are signing up for. Most of us live in our

heads and have very little idea how they actually operate. Vipassana

removes enough distraction that you begin to see the machinery.

What you do with that is up to you.

There was a modest but genuine improvement in my ability to

concentrate. A few truths about myself I had been conveniently

ignoring, now sitting in plain sight. And the beginning of what I

suspect will be a much longer conversation with questions I hadn't

thought to ask before.

Vipassana is not a Buddha-making machine. You do not walk in an

ordinary confused person and emerge the other side with the

impurities neatly separated out and a sense of cosmic purpose

awaiting you. You walk in an ordinary confused person and walk out a

slightly more observant version of that same ordinary confused

person.

Clarity, it seems, arrives on its own schedule. --

This is the first piece in an ongoing series where I intend to

examine the things we call spiritual, honestly and somewhat

irreverently. Not with the intention to dismiss or worship them.

Just to look carefully and see what's actually there when the noise

settles.

Dharma, after all, is just the law of nature.

And I intend to keep dissecting it.

Dhamma Banga is located near Sonarpur, roughly an hour's drive from

Kolkata, and easily accessible by local train from Sealdah to

Baruipur. The course is free. Registration is through dhamma.org