Free The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

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 myfeet 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 hekneels 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