Koh Samui is a large, highly developed, highly populated island in the Gulf of Thailand. It’s usually filled with European families on vacation and Russians avoiding the draft, but right now it’s low season and there’s hardly anybody here.
I’m currently smack dab in the centre of the action, rotting deliciously in an Irish pub that blasts Western pop music until sunrise, seven days a week. I wait in this loud, empty place for my friend from Cambodia, and when she shows up we pilgrimage to a wat showcasing a mummified monk meditating in a glass box. His body is a nesting ground for a local gecko species, and he’s wearing sunglasses.
After paying our respects, we go out drinking so that I can get drunk for the last time in a while.
I wake up with the worst hangover of my life—the mission had been a success. I vomit pale yellow stuff, and then take a taxi down to a nondescript building filled with paperback books that are the same colour as the vomit. I surrender my phone, wallet, passport, cigarettes and book of plays by Chekhov. I’m assigned a dog tag (#4), and after that, a group of us are driven in the back of a pickup to a second location—a compound deep in the centre of the island.
Arrival at the compound
The compound is set on a hill, a small village composed of dark houses and empty pavilions nestled in thick jungle. The men’s dormitory is at the very top—a maze of grey rooms in the basement of the meditation hall. I find the barred windows, wooden pillows and thin mattresses on concrete slabs to be quite spartan, but I’m later informed that the accommodations are, in fact, luxurious. Whatever. I’m not paying any money to be here, so I can’t complain.
The buildings are muted and impeccably clean. The walls are blank, except for the occasional yellowing laminate reminding us that we have no souls, and to please help save electricity by remembering to turn off the lights. I size up the other students—10 or 15 foreigners like myself, of varying ages. There’s no talking allowed, and the men and women are separated at all times.
The brass bell
Our lives are dictated by a brass bell. We’re woken up at 4:30 a.m. and sent to bed at 9 p.m. That leaves seven and a half hours for sleeping, provided you fall asleep right away and don’t stay up listening to all the alien noise, the cheeps and whirrs, the hypnotic susurrus of the jungle.
There are geckos as long as my forearm, and black scorpions. There are also three shiny roosters that have free range of the grounds, and at dusk there are fireflies.
Two vegetarian meals a day are eaten in a silent cafeteria, boys in the front and girls in the back. Before each meal, we chant a promise not to eat for pleasure, which is an easy promise to keep because by the time everyone’s seated and the chant is completed, the food is cold. Dinner is tea and rambutans, and no promises.
We spend hours and hours shuffling about, focusing on the sensations in the soles of our feet. There’s a special pavilion just for this activity, with a floor covered in coarse sand. When I walk slower than someone, I think about how much better I am than them. When someone walks slower than me I curse them in my head, calling them a fraud and a kiss-ass.
At night, we walk in single file around the rotunda that encircles the top of the brick stupa, with boys in front, girls in the back. We walk and walk in silent circles for hours. The rotunda overlooks the vast ocean, burning in the moonlight. Palm tree silhouettes wave like friendly giants in the warm breeze, and in the distance you can see the glittering lights of civilization, but you’re not supposed to look.
When we’re not walking, we’re sitting in the meditation hall, this time with boys on the left and girls on the right. Sometimes we chant in Pali, but most of the time we just sit and sit there in meditation. Every day, I watch the pain rise and fall in my knees and ankles. I switch positions, try and get comfortable, and then it all starts over again.
Teachers, tasks and a giant spider
Our teachers are three expats: volunteers dressed in loose capris and white button-ups, armed with tote bags. They sit in full lotus on a wooden bench beneath a great eight-spoked wheel that’s hanging at the front of the meditation hall. They tell us that all life is suffering, and have us imagine the bloated, rotting corpses of those we find attractive. Women cry and men leave without saying a word.
There’s a recording of a dog barking that plays on a loop for hours and hours in the early mornings and afternoons. The farmers next door play it to scare the rats and monkeys away from the durian crop. Each time the recording starts, my heart sinks. Eventually a melody grows out of the barking, and I hum along to it.
We’re each assigned a chore—mine is mopping the meditation hall. It’s by far the most important chore, and I take great pride in my work. One day, while mopping, I see the fattest spider on Earth. It’s orange and rubbery and is crouched next to a small hole in the hardwood floor, near where my meditation cushion normally is.
I freeze and we have a staring contest, each waiting on the other’s move. I will the spider to go away, but it refuses, so I give up and go mop the other side of the hall. When I turn around, the spider is gone, never to be seen again. Sometimes, though, I can feel eyes on me during meditation, and I’ll sneak a peek into the small, dark hole in the floor.
I’m in a sort of trance, barely thinking. Other people have faded to hazy forms in my periphery. Honestly, I’m feeling pretty great, but then I get a stuffy nose and everything comes crashing down. In the psychological vacuum of this place, something as trivial as a stuffy nose is blown way out of proportion. I have nothing to do but sit with my nose and feel it. I walk around and around, mouth-breathing like death.
The main atrium
One afternoon I wander into the stupa’s main atrium, a place I haven’t explored yet. On the walls and ceiling are great glittering murals—depictions of dead bodies decomposing, black elephants transforming into white ones. After days and days of blank walls and muted colours, these vibrant paintings are like visual heroin. I stare and stare at them.
A large one in the centre depicts samsara—the endless cycle of death and rebirth inside of which we’re all trapped. The mural is a large wheel held by Yama, the god of death. The outer ring of the wheel is divided into 12 links, and the eighth link depicts a man shot with an arrow. Craving. The man craves relief from his discomfort, just like me and my poor nose.
But this craving is a source of suffering, says the Buddhists. Our aversion to pain, our desire for something better is precisely what keeps us trapped here, dooms us to wait forever for a satisfaction that never comes.
Right then and there my teachers’ lessons finally sink in. It’s not my stuffy nose that’s the problem, it’s my problem with my stuffy nose that’s the problem. A stuffy nose is just a sensory experience, neither good nor bad. It’s the craving for a clear nose, the waiting on things to change that’s making me suffer. This epiphany makes me feel better, not because my nose is any more bearable, but because I feel like I’ve learned something.
Goodbye, Koh Samui
Just in time, too—the retreat’s over. I make a pitiful donation to the centre, and then join some of the other students at a cafe. I order a coffee, which is a big mistake, and I’m almost too high to function. We sit there all day with our newfound ability to talk, discussing consciousness and masturbation and gossiping about the other students.
I watch these bodies that I’ve been silently living with for 10 days suddenly spring forward with names and accents and personalities. A middle-aged woman from the U.K. who had been scowling all week turns out to be funny and personable. As we chat, I slowly realize that I’m surrounded by people who are addicted to pushing the limits of their minds. One girl has just come from doing ayahuasca in Peru, while another is on his way to shave his head and eyebrows and live with the monks in Isaan.
I slowly realize that I’m surrounded by people who are addicted to pushing the limits of their minds.
One by one they drift away, off to continue their lives, never to be seen again. I’m one of the last to leave. When it’s time, one of them gives me a ride to the pier on his motorbike, and that’s that.
On the mainland, I hop in a van and wait as they pack it to the ceiling with luggage and tourists. We drive to town and wait for the bus. A bus comes, we all get up. The bus opens and more people arrive, also waiting for the bus. This continues until the luggage is spilling into the street and the shoes are piled three-deep.
Finally, the right bus comes. We get on and wait as they fix some mechanical issues. When the bus finally starts, we’re informed that this is not, in fact, our bus, but simply the bus that is taking us to the real bus. After the drive, we all have to get off and wait and wait again, and when that final bus finally comes we all get on and wait the 10 hours it takes to get to Bangkok.
During this whole ordeal, my dopamine receptors are still way too sensitive to go on my phone. All I can manage without becoming overstimulated is people-watching, so I sit and sit there, making them all uncomfortable with my calm presence, watching them smoke and fidget and look desperately down the road. There is a lot of pain and suffering in waiting, and there is a lot of waiting in this world.
I know that the effects of the meditation retreat will eventually wear off. Soon my dopamine receptors will desensitize, and I’ll be suffering right along with everybody else. After all, like the Buddhists say, nothing lasts forever. But for right now, for this brief moment, I’m free from all that. I’m happy, craving nothing, content to wait just a little bit longer.
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images: Depositphotos
