Making contact

The story of my contact with dhamma could be the story of my whole life .The earliest memory of anything specifically Buddhist could be from my teens, when I read one of Jack Kerouac’s books and suddenly decided that I was a Buddhist. I didn’t know what that meant, but when people asked me I would say, ‘Everything exists; and that is the same as everything not existing’.

I couldn’t have told you what that meant either, but it was an attempt to express the fact that the apparent world of the senses seemed unreal, and the world of thoughts also seemed unreal. I sensed a vast but not really threatening emptiness under it all. I was struck by the fact that if you close your eyes, the visual world no longer existed. It was as if the world as we know it was only there as long as the senses engaged with it. Take away the senses and the world went as well. That didn’t seem a very ‘real’ kind of reality.

During my time as a student I sometimes tried to meditate. I thought this meant emptying one’s mind, so I would sit down cross-legged and try not to think of anything at all. It was very difficult. After a time – weeks or months – of occasional practice like this, I found that the easiest way of not thinking was to be aware of the breath. Then, after a further time I found that if I was conscious of nothing but the breath, and did not think at all, a violet-coloured circular patch of light would appear in the ‘space’ within my closed eyes. There was a pleasant feeling associated with this.

After finishing my time as a student I began to meet people who told me they were practising a particular form of meditation: Samatha. I had no idea what it was but I felt interested, and it seemed more than just a coincidence. I wanted to join the meditation class, but it had just finished for the summer. This meant a three-months’ wait.

I was intensely eager to begin and in the meantime borrowed two books: Saddhatissa’s The Buddha’s Way and Nyanaponika’s The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. I read them avidly, learned the lists by heart: the eightfold path, the five hindrances, and five faculties, the four noble truths etc and devised my own special way of intensive study.

After the summer, I was at last able to join a meditation class when the new term began. In the first class we were asked to do five minutes of breathing practice.I did it every day, and it seemed like a clarifying focus for the entire day. The chaos of my life seemed to have a focus or fixed point and gradually from this tiny dot of calm, a sense of tranquillity spread little by little over my life. The meditation became the pivot or key point of the day, around which everything else revolved. The practice expanded through its stages up to half an hour and many other things followed, but it has remained a key to – I’m not sure what – and perhaps I’m not sure because it has been the key to everything.

There has also been the observation that I get ratty and irritable if I don’t do it for a few days. That’s not to say I have always done it, or always enjoyed it. Once the novelty wore off, it became a chore, albeit a necessary and rewarding chore. But, there has always been the sense of it as a way to go up higher, or down deeper, to connect to different worlds and draw strength from them