The arrival


Seeing as I have to start somewhere in relating the story of these four years—during which I tried to write an upbeat, subtle little book on yoga, was confronted with things as downbeat and unsubtle as jihadist terrorism and the refugee crisis, was plunged so deep in melancholic depression that I was committed to the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital for four months, and, finally, during which I bade farewell to my editor of thirty-five years, who for the first time wouldn’t be there to read my next book—I choose to start with this morning in January 2015, when, as I finished packing, I wondered whether I should take my phone, which in any event I wouldn’t be able to keep with me where I was going, or leave it at home. I selected the more extreme option, and no sooner had I left our building than I was thrilled to be under the radar. It was just a short walk to the Gare de Bercy, where I’d catch my train. From this annex of the Gare de Lyon, small in size and already quite provincial, dilapidated train cars take you straight to the French heartland. The old-fashioned compartments, with six first-class and eight second-class brown and gray-green seats, reminded me of the trains of my distant childhood in the sixties. A few army recruits slept stretched out on the seats, as if no one had told them that military service had been abolished long ago. With her face turned toward the dusty window, the only person near me watched the graffitied buildings file past under a fine gray rain as we left Paris and passed through the suburbs to the east. She was young, and looked a bit like a hiker with her huge backpack. I wondered if she was on her way to go trekking in the Morvan hills, as I’d done long ago, in weather conditions that weren’t any better than they were today, or if she was going—who knows?—to the same place I was. I’d made up my mind not to take a book, and spent the trip—an hour and a half—letting my eyes and thoughts wander in a sort of calm impatience. Without knowing exactly what, I was expecting a lot from these ten days I’d spend cut off from everything, out of contact, beyond reach. I observed myself waiting, I observed my calm impatience. It was interesting. When the train stopped at Migennes, the young woman with the big backpack also got off, and, along with me and twenty or so other people, headed over to the square in front of the station where a shuttle bus would pick us up. We waited in silence, seeing as no one knew anyone else. Everyone sized up everyone else, wondering if they looked normal or not. I would have said they did, or at least normal enough. When the coach pulled up, some sat down together, I sat alone. Just before we left, a woman in her fifties with a handsome, solemn, sculpted face climbed in and sat down beside me. We said quick hellos, then she closed her eyes, indicating that it was fine with her if we didn’t talk. No one spoke. The coach soon left the town and headed down narrow roads, crossing villages where nothing seemed open—not even the shutters. After half an hour it turned onto a dirt road lined with oak trees, and stopped on a gravel driveway in front of a low farmhouse. We got off, picked up our bags from the luggage bay, and entered the building through separate doors, one for the men and one for the women. We men found ourselves in a large, neon-lit room fitted out like a school dining hall, with pale yellow walls and small posters bearing bits of calligraphed Buddhist wisdom. There were some new faces, people who hadn’t been in the coach and who must have arrived by car. Behind a Formica table, a young man with an open, friendly face—dressed in a T-shirt while everyone else was wearing either sweaters or fleece jackets—welcomed the new arrivals one by one. Before going up to him we had to fill out a questionnaire.

The questionnaire

After pouring myself a glass of tea from a big copper samovar, I sat down in front of the questionnaire. Four pages, back and front. The first didn’t need much thought: personal information; people to contact in case of emergency; medical situation, medication, if any. I wrote down that I was in good health but that I’d suffered several bouts of depression. After that, we were invited to describe: (1) how we’d become acquainted with Vipassana; (2) what experience we’d had with meditation; (3) our current stage in life; (4) what we expected from the session. There was no more than a third of a page for each answer, and I thought that to seriously tackle even the second question I’d have to write an entire book, and that in fact I’d come here to write it—but I wasn’t about to mention this. Prudently, I stuck to saying that I’d been practicing meditation for twenty years, that for a long time I’d combined it with tai chi (putting, in parentheses, “small circulation,” so they’d know I wasn’t a complete beginner), and that today I combined it with yoga. However, I didn’t practice regularly, I went on, and it was to get a better grounding that I’d enrolled in an intensive session. As to my “stage in life,” the truth is that I was in a good way, an extremely favorable period that had lasted almost ten years. It was surprising, even, after so many years when I would unfailingly have answered this question by saying that I was doing very, very badly, and that that particular moment in my life was particularly catastrophic, to be able to answer candidly, even playing down my good fortune, that I was doing just fine, that I hadn’t suffered from depression for some time, that I had neither love nor family nor professional nor material problems, and that my only real problem—and it certainly is one, albeit a privileged person’s problem—was my unwieldy, despotic ego, whose control I was hoping to limit, and that that’s just what meditation was for.

The others

Around me are fifty or so men, in whose company I will sit and be silent for ten days. I eye them discreetly, wondering who among them is going through a crisis. Who, like me, has a family. Who’s single, who’s been dumped, who’s poor or unhappy. Who’s emotionally fragile, who’s solid. Who risks being overwhelmed by the vertigo of silence. All ages are represented, from twenty to seventy, I’d say. As to what they might do for a living, it’s also varied. There are some readily identifiable types: the outdoorsy, vegetarian high school teacher, adept of the Eastern mystics; the young guy with dreadlocks and a Peruvian beanie; the physiotherapist or osteopath who’s into the martial arts; and others who could be anything from violinists to railway ticketing employees, impossible to tell. All in all, it’s the sort of mix you’d find at a dojo, say, or in any of the hostels along the Way of Saint James. Since the Noble Silence, as it’s called, hasn’t yet been imposed, we’re still allowed to talk. As night begins to fall, very early and very black behind the misty windowpanes, I listen to the conversations of the small groups that have formed. Everything revolves around what awaits us in the morning. One question comes up again and again: “Is this your first time?” I’d say about half the group are new, and half are veterans. The former are curious, excited, apprehensive, while the latter benefit from the prestige that comes with experience. One little guy reminds me of someone, but I can’t say who. Since I’m a negative sort of person, my attention focuses on him. With a pointed goatee and a wine-toned jacquard sweater, he’s annoyingly smug in the role of the smiling, benign sage, rich in insights into chakra alignment and the benefits of letting go.

Teleportation in Tiruvannamalai

The first time I heard about Vipassana was in India, in the spring of 2011. To finish my Russian adventure novel Limonov I’d rented a house in the former French enclave of Puducherry, where I stayed for two months almost without talking to a soul. I started my days, which invariably followed the same routine, reading The Times of India in the only café, as far as I knew, where you could get an espresso. Then, following the streets that intersect at right angles and which, lined with run-down colonial buildings, bear names like Avenue Aristide Briand, Rue Pierre Loti, or Boulevard Maréchal Foch, I walked pensively back to the house to work on my book. I went to bed very early, around the time when the innumerable stray dogs in Puducherry would strike up a chorus of barking in which I could make out a few voices, and I got up very early too, woken by the first rays of dawn and the croaking of geckos. This sort of homey routine, without visits to museums or monuments or touristic obligations, is my ideal trip abroad. One time, however, I did go to Tiruvannamalai, which is a hot spot of Indian spirituality because that’s where the grand mystic Ramana Maharshi lived and taught, and where his ashram is still located. The hot spot made a very bad impression on me: a fairground of gurus and spiritual seminars that attracts hordes of gaunt, grimy, fake Western sadhus oozing both pretension and suffering. Now when people who practice yoga talk to me about retreats in India where they hope to benefit from the ancestral teachings of the great masters, that’s what I think of. For me Tiruvannamalai and Rishikesh—said to be the cradle of yoga—are the places where you stand the least chance of benefiting from the teachings of a great master: as little chance, say, as you do of meeting an original artist on Place du Tertre at the top of Montmartre in Paris. Bertrand and Sandra, the only two friends I’d made in Puducherry, had given me the address of a French guy who lived there. Dressed in a lilac-colored robe, he was called Didier but he had people call him Bismillah. When I asked him about his spiritual journey, Bismillah told me that one big step for him had been a Vipassana training session: ten days of intense meditation that, as he said, really cleaned out your head. As I practiced meditation in my own small way and on the face of it wasn’t against getting my head cleaned out, I was curious. However, I was a little put off when I found out that on the next step of his spiritual journey Bismillah had come to Tiruvannamalai attracted by a seminar on teleportation. He’d been disappointed, he said. That left me thinking. Teleportation consists in traveling instantaneously from one place to another, simply through the power of your mind. Disappearing, say, in Chennai, and reappearing the next moment in Mumbai. A variant of that is bilocation: being in two places at the same time. Several traditions credit such exploits to a few rare, distinguished saints, such as Joseph of Cupertino. But religious authorities—to say nothing of scientists—remain cautious on the subject. I couldn’t help wondering if a guy who registers for a public seminar on the Internet in the hope of having such an experience—a bit like signing up for a day of scuba diving in the hope of seeing manta rays—demonstrated exemplary open-mindedness, or whether to swallow such a load of fiction, and then to say you’re disappointed, you had to be a bit of an idiot.

My room

The question of accommodation worries me. There are individual rooms and shared rooms, and of course I’d prefer a room by myself but I imagine so would everyone else, and I have no reason to say I need one more than anyone else. In another setting money would solve things: the best rooms would go to those with the most money and I’d have nothing to worry about. But here we’re put up free of charge. The teaching, the room and board, it’s all free. All they do is suggest you make a donation at the end, as much as you’re comfortable with and without anyone knowing how much you’ve given. There must be another criterion. The order of arrival? Or they draw lots? Or it’s completely random? When I’m done filling out my questionnaire and take it over to the nice guy who’s collecting them, I ask him about it with an amused, complicit little smile, in the unlikely case that it depends simply on his goodwill. No, he tells me, also smiling, they don’t draw lots: the rooms are assigned according to age. The single rooms go to the most elderly participants. So I don’t have to worry after all. The nice young man gives me a key, which I take, and I go out into the soaked garden behind the main building. To the left there’s the big empty hall where we’ll spend ten or so hours a day for ten days, to the right three rows of prefab bungalows. Mine’s in the first row. Just over a hundred square feet, linoleum floor, a single bed—under it a plastic box with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow—a shower, a sink and a toilet, a little closet: the strict minimum, all perfectly clean. And well heated, which is important in the winter in the Morvan region. The only source of light, apart from the window in the door with a pull-down blind, is a frosted glass globe on the ceiling. It’s not what you’d call cozy, I’d have liked a bedside lamp, but seeing as we’re not supposed to read … I make my bed, put my things in the closet: warm, comfy clothes, thick sweaters, jogging pants, slippers, this is no time for vanity. My yoga mat. A little terra-cotta statue representing the Gemini twins. Five inches tall, with full, round curves: a woman I loved gave me this discreet fetish, which I take with me wherever I go. No books, telephones, tablets, or any of their chargers. When we spoke, the nice young man asked if I had any such objects to leave in storage: lockers are provided. I answered proudly that I’d left all of that at home. Is everyone as compunctious in following the instructions I’d received when I signed up two months earlier? Fine, we’d signed and agreed to do without such distractions and not communicate with the outside world for ten days. But if we cheat, who’ll find out? It would surprise me if they made spot checks and confiscated any books or phones people had snuck in.

Or perhaps they would?

North Korea?

Vipassana sessions are the commando training of meditation. Ten days, ten hours a day, in silence, cut off from everything: hard-core. On the forums, a lot of people say they’re satisfied with, and sometimes even that they were transformed by, such a demanding experience. Others denounce them as a sort of sectarian indoctrination. The place is like a concentration camp, they say, and the daily meeting a form of brainwashing, with no room for discussion, to say nothing of disagreement. North Korea. The duty of silence, the isolation, and the poor nutrition demean the participants and turn them into zombies. What’s more, leaving is forbidden, no matter how bad you feel. No, defenders argue, if you want to go you can go, no one’s stopping you, it’s just strongly discouraged. Above all, the participants themselves commit to staying until the end. I was intrigued but not put off by such discussions: I feel immune to sectarian indoctrination, I’m even curious about it. “Come and see,” Christ said to those who had heard all sorts of contradictory rumors about him, and that still seems to me to be the best policy: come and see, with as little prejudice as possible, or at least with an awareness of whatever prejudices you have.


Zafu in Brittany


I’ve been married twice, and both times I made albums of family photos. Then when you separate, you never know where these albums will end up. The children look at them with nostalgia, because they show the times when they were little, when their parents loved each other like they should, when things still hadn’t gone wrong. My first wife, Anne, and I spent the summer vacation in Brittany, at Pointe de l’Arcouest, where we rented a house that was marvelous but completely run-down because it was owned jointly and none of the co-owners saw why they, and not their brothers or sisters, should change a lightbulb. Facing Île-de-Bréhat, it had a superb view of the sea, which we reached by walking down a wooded path that was so steep and so wild that each summer it had to be cleared with a machete. Anne was incredibly pretty. She wore blue-and-white-striped jerseys and a bright yellow raincoat, I had unruly locks of hair and little round glasses. I would have liked to look mature, I looked like an adolescent. In the mornings we went to get crêpes at the village bakery, in the evenings we bought crabs down at the docks. Among the many photos of our two little boys, one in my album shows me on the beach with Gabriel, aged three or four, doing the canonical series of yoga postures called the sun salutation, and another shows Jean-Baptiste sitting on a zafu, laughing the happy laugh of a child. These photographs date the practices I’m discussing here, and attest that at the beginning of the 1990s I already had a zafu. I was already sitting on it, early in the mornings, taking pains to wake up before everyone else to observe my breathing and the flow of my thoughts. A zafu, if you don’t know, is a round, compact Japanese cushion, specially designed to help you sit upright while meditating. Our boys liked to call this black zafu Zafu, as if it were a pet, a second dog—the first one being a mangy, one-eyed mongrel we called “the poor old guy,” who lived somewhere in the neighborhood and came to see us every day. I know that these memories interest only Anne, the boys, and me, that we’re the only four people in the world whom they can make smile, or cry, but too bad, too bad for you, reader, you’ll have to put up with the fact that authors relate these kinds of things and don’t delete them when they’re rereading what they’ve written, as would only be reasonable, because they’re precious, and because one reason to write is also to save them.

Tai chi on the mount

As I wrote in the questionnaire, I started to meditate thanks to tai chi. You know what tai chi is, I believe? Those very slow movements that people—often quite old—do in parks, dressed in padded Chinese jackets? Is it a dance? Gymnastics? A martial art? Originally it was a martial art, but unfortunately it’s often taught as if this dimension didn’t exist. I thank my lucky stars that I first ran across the Dojo de la Montagne, on Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, on the Left Bank in Paris, rather than one of those New Age groups that were springing up all around, where you were invited to open your chakras by burning incense sticks. Burning incense sticks wasn’t the thing at the Dojo de la Montagne. The oldest karate dojo in Paris, it was established in the fifties by a pioneer called Henry Plée and headed, when I arrived, by his son, Pascal. Pascal got his white belt on his third birthday and has since trained a generation of karatekas, but with time, seeing that intensive training hurt the back, the knees, the joints, he started to look for more gentle, less arduous techniques, focusing less on force and more on flexibility. That’s how he came to study tai chi under a Chinese master called Yang Jwing-Ming—Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming—who wasn’t only a practitioner but also a very high-caliber researcher in the practically boundless field of what’s known as the “internal” martial arts. I still have a half dozen of his books, which I studied fervently at the time. Because after a couple of months at the Dojo de la Montagne I was hooked, and stayed that way for almost ten years. Practically ten whole years, with three or four classes per week—not counting Dr. Yang’s annual seminar—I spent immersed in the strange culture that is the dojo. More than dinners or parties, I’ve always appreciated this sort of get-together where you don’t just meet to talk or see each other, as they say, but to do something together. No matter what: hiking, soccer, motorbiking. My ideal would have been to meet up with a few friends and play chamber music, say the viola in an amateur string quartet: you arrive at a member’s place and exchange a few perfunctory words, then very quickly you unfold the stands, spread out the music, and pick up where you left off, at the sixteenth bar of the andante con moto. Unfortunately, I love music without being able either to read or play it. But I think that doing tai chi is much like singing or playing an instrument. It requires the same perseverance, the same blend of rigor and abandon, and I think with fondness of all the people of such different backgrounds and temperaments with whom I spent so many hours, practicing and perfecting infinitely slow movements the way a pianist practices and perfects the equivalent of this infinite slowness on the piano: the larghissimo. I was going to say that we all came for the same reason and were united by the same desire, but that’s not quite it. There were two families at the Dojo de la Montagne: on the one hand the pounders, Pascal’s close guard, made up of robust karatekas who, notwithstanding all the talk, were there to learn how to beat up their fellow men, and on the other those I’ll call the spiritualists, and by that I don’t mean the New Age chatterboxes who were quickly put off by the dojo’s demanding routine, but people who were interested in Zen, in the Tao, in meditation. And the great thing was that under the double leadership of Pascal and Dr. Yang, these two families not only got along peacefully but also shared each other’s interests. Very naturally, and while both groups would have been horrified if you’d told them this was where they were heading, the spiritualists like me found themselves doing karate as well as tai chi so as to make the tai chi they were doing more martial, while the pounders increasingly found themselves sitting motionless on little cushions and observing their breath.

It’s complicated

Sitting motionless on a little cushion and observing your breath is what’s called meditation. It’s a practice that’s becoming more and more widespread, and it would have been the sole subject of this book if life hadn’t taken it, as you’ll see, toward stormier terrain. Dr. Yang taught it with care. He was Chinese, he appreciated technique—bless his heart—he didn’t rush things, and he considered meditation the apogee of the martial arts, but also a dangerous practice due to the powerful forces it awakens. He put us on guard against these dangers, which it seems to me I’ve never faced, either because I was never aware of them or more probably because I’ve never reached and never will reach the level at which they become a threat. As he didn’t want us to go astray on the dangerous paths leading to the chasms within us, a bit like the way you give to novices a taste of the raptures they’ll later experience, Dr. Yang taught us the rudiments of meditation by means of numerous diagrams, meridian pathways, normal breathing (Buddhist) and inverted breathing (Taoist), small and large circulation. And—as I just wrote on the page of the questionnaire dealing with my experience with meditation—what I know a bit about is the small circulation. After that I practiced with another master, Faeq Biria, who gained his profound knowledge of Iyengar yoga from the founder himself, B.K.S. Iyengar. Faeq Biria goes further than Dr. Yang, and maintains that to start meditating you need at least ten years of assiduous practice. You have to have opened the pelvic region, opened the shoulders, aligned the bandhas, aligned the chakras, and mastered all the techniques of pranayama, and only then does this grand, mysterious, transformative thing called meditation happen, and it happens on its own. Everything you did before was merely aimed at making it possible. Someone who shows up at an Iyengar yoga school and asks naively if, in addition to postures, it’s also possible to do a bit of meditation is treated with indulgence, but at the same time like a bit of a nitwit. He’s told nicely that there’s as good as no difference between what the fashionable gurus and books on personal development call meditation and twiddling your thumbs: that without long preparatory work you can spend thousands of hours on a zafu focusing on your breath or the point between your eyebrows, but you could just as well be taking a nap.

It’s simple

These two masters, both of whom I knew personally, are true, great masters, equally researchers and artists: I do not call their authority into question. However, from the height of my minute experience, I believe that you can gain access to meditation over a path that’s less steep, a shorter path that’s open to everyone, and that all the technique you need to take it can be learned in five minutes. It consists in sitting down for a while and remaining silent and motionless. Everything that happens inside you during the time you remain seated, silent and motionless, is meditation. I’ve often looked for a good definition—as simple, accurate, and all-encompassing as possible—and while there are others that I’ll unpack as this story progresses, this one seems to be the best to start off with because it’s the most concrete and the least intimidating. I repeat: meditation is everything that happens inside you during the time when you’re seated, silent and motionless. Boredom is meditation. The pains in your knees, back, and neck are meditation. The rumbling of your stomach is meditation. The feeling that you’re wasting your time with bogus spirituality is meditation. The telephone call that you prepare in your head and the desire to get up and make it are meditation. Resisting this desire is meditation—giving in to it isn’t, though, of course. That’s all. Nothing more. Anything more is too much. If you do that regularly, for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour a day, then what happens during this time when you remain seated, silent and motionless, changes. Your posture changes. Your breathing changes. Your thoughts change. All of that changes because in any case everything changes, but also because you’re observing it. You don’t do anything in meditation, the key thing is not to do anything, except observe. You observe the appearance of your thoughts, your emotions, your sensations in your field of consciousness. You observe their disappearance. You observe what buoys them up, their points of reference, their convergence lines. You observe their passing. You don’t cling to them, you don’t repel them. You follow the flow without letting yourself be carried away by it. As you do that, it’s life itself that changes. At first you don’t notice. You have the vague feeling that you’re on the cusp of something. Little by little, it becomes clearer. You detach a little, just a little, from what you call yourself. A little is already a lot. It’s already enormous. It’s worth it. It’s a journey. At the start of this journey, a Zen saying goes, the distant mountain looks like a mountain. As the journey unfolds, the mountain never stops changing. You no longer recognize it, it’s replaced by a series of illusions, you no longer have any idea where you’re heading. At the end of the journey it’s a mountain once again, but it has nothing at all to do with what you saw from a distance, long ago, when you started the journey. It really is the mountain. You can finally see it. You’ve arrived. You’re there.

You’re there.


Copyright © 2020 by Emmanuel Carrère and P.O.L éditeur

Copyright © 2022 by John Lambert