Meditating, Noise and Birthday Girls

 

By Tim Cooper

I am a disastrous Buddhist.

I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to do things that I do not want to do. I want enlightenment now; I want it all, although I have no idea of what enlightenment might be or feel like.

I sometimes imagine that it would be a state of complete bliss, in which you smile beatifically at the checkout girl when she sneers at you (again), or you can be a vegetarian without missing bacon, or feel deep, unconditional love for Elon Musk.

But none of this has arrived yet, and damn it, it’s just not fair. I meditate, I read books on Buddhism, I have a little altar with figurines on it, I burn incense. But I see the checkout girl and still feel my fists when she sneers at me. Me, the man who can.

I recently saw a video with Tenzing Palmo.

If you forget the shaven head and the maroon robes, she looks and sounds like a nice little old English lady, with her London accent and her habit of beaming at everyone.

But this video showed another side of her, one that reminded me of the teachers I knew and feared at primary school. Tough old spinsters who shot you down in flames with just one look, women who could control a crowd of little brutes with one smart crack of a metre rule on the desk or on your arse.

Tenzing Palmo has no truck with instant-enlightenment seekers, spiritual idlers and elitists who think they deserve realisations because they’re privileged babies. She said as much in clear, incisive tones, slowly and steadily treading on my spiritual sandcastles.

She made me feel that way because I knew who she was talking about, and it was partly about me. And she isn’t any old self-styled “spiritual seeker.” She lived in a little cave/hut on a mountainside in India for 12 years, in deep meditation and sleeping about three hours a night. She got snowed in once and had to tunnel her way out or die.

She’s also said that meditating alone on a mountainside is what she prefers to do, and all the time she spends talking to spiritual bums and slackers like me is just a way of raising money to fund a monastery for Tibetan nuns who’ve managed to cross the border into India. She’s earned the right to trample on my contemplative sandcastles.

So now I try to meditate every day…and it gets no easier.

I continue to place expectations on the process and the results. The good sessions could always have been better and the “bad” sessions, when the mind freaks out like a rat on meth from the very moment the bell in the meditation app bell chimes, well, they just don’t bear thinking about. “In, out, in, what’s for dinner, make a salad, don’t like salad, fuck salad, I want a hamburger, out, in, my back hurts, out” etc.

But then, but then…

Right next door to my apartment there’s a bar. Because I live in Spain, having a bar nearby means noise, especially when it’s one of the most popular bars in town. People spill out onto the street, block the traffic—and, being Spaniards, shout a lot. Coming from a country of mumblers, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer quantity and intensity of rowdy noise Spaniards can make.

In Spain, you don’t mumble, you shout. This bar is a firm favourite with football fans and gangs of girls who get drunk and celebrate a friend’s birthday with a lot of shouting and screeching. This often coincides with the moment I reluctantly sit down to meditate,

Then they start to sing happy birthday. The street resounds with a drunken rendition of “cumpleaños feliz,” and girlish screams of delight before they start to hand out the presents that the birthday girl never really wanted, to more screams of delight. Then everyone carries on shouting.

One day I made a remarkable discovery—I no longer cared.

Previously, I would have sat there, worrying about my dhyana mudra, and then hear the girls cranking up for another chorus of “feliz, feliz en tu diaaaa” and make a mental note of the wish to do stuff like spray the birthday girl, her friends and her unwanted presents with a high-pressure water hose.

That made me feel deeply unspiritual.

I realised that all the ruckus had become “noise.” Shouting Spaniards, the TV next door, the souped-up car—it was all just “noise.”

Someone famous in Virtual Western Dharmaland once said that meditation is like walking through a forest in a thick mist. At first, you don’t feel the damp, but keep walking, keep walking, and you might just realise that you’re wetter than a playful otter.

You could say that for some their forest is a bar and 20 drunken girls. They sit in a room, breathe and think “noise,” “feeling,” “itchy butt, must scratch, no, wait, feeling.” Little by little, the birthday girls get to form part of the background. They’re grist to the mill.

But the question remains: how do I get to feel deep, unconditional love for Elon Musk?

 

Tim Cooper is a more or less practicing Buddhist and recovering alcoholic who’s lived in Spain for over half his life. After many years of stumbling about in the lush gardens of Buddhism, picking one flower here and another flower there, he finally settled down and is trying to make sense of it all in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and generally trying to be a bit nicer. He works as a translator, teacher and facilitator with fellow ex-drunks. He likes flowers, rugby, bad science fiction films and cooking. He also likes to think he writes like Hemingway, but the rejection slips tell another story.

 

Editor: Dana Gornall

Photo: Pixabay

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