A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose....

That's what the Buddhists say at least...

Ok. So. How do I summarize my five days of silence and meditation to you all? I guess I should start by saying that yes, I did check out early. And before you all say it, it wasn't because it was too 'hard'. It was more because I felt I had gotten everything I could out of the experience, and there were enough things that I disagreed with that I felt it was time for me to leave before I started resenting being there.

Nuff said.

Now.
How to sum up the experience of sitting in silent meditation for 12 hours a day (out of 17 hours awake), sleeping on a slab of concrete, eating two vegan meals a day (last meal finished at 1 o'clock), and generally being completely isolated from 'life'?

For starters, I discovered that Buddhism is in fact a religion. Not a philosophy. A religion. Any 'philosophy' where there is a revered god (Buddah...who they do revere. They talk about him like a god all the time), where you have 10 'noble' truths (why can't they just be truths, plain and simple?), where you chant in a suspiciously prayer like manner...to me all of this spells religion. Which is fine, but came as a bit of a shock to me.

Then there are the underlying principles of Buddhism. I think in North America we get a very commercialized, glamourized version of what Buddhism is. It's all very trendy and hip and you meditate in your Lulu pants and then go for a fair trade coffee afterwards.

THAT, I could do.

But this was very different. Aside from the obvious lack of lulus and coffee, the entire belief system really took me by surprise.

During our daily Dhamma lectures, the monks and nuns constantly talked about 'clearing your mind, letting go of all your worries and troubles and stresses'. Which led me to wonder: why am here? I don't really feel like I have worries and stresses...c'mon, I'm bumming around the world with zero responsibilites. How stressful can that be? So I began to wonder if maybe this was not the right place for me. What is the point of meditation? If it's just to get rid of stress...well then I might as well check out right away. In adddition, I had a bit of a problem with the idea of 'letting go' being the solution to your troubles. If you have a problem, in my mind it makes sense to think it through and figure out how to deal with it. If you just 'let go' of the troubled thoughts, well that's not really going to solve theproblem, just delay it...right?

So on the fourth day, I was able to spend half an hour speaking to one of the monks. It was very...enriching. Basically I asked him what the point of all this is. And his response was that in order for someone to achieve total harmony and balance in life, you need to accept that a flower is just a flower, a sunset is just a sunset, a teddy bear is just a teddy bear. When you sigh over the flower, or your heart flutters at the sunset or you hug your teddy - these are all our ways of projecting our own dukkah (roughly translated as 'baggage') onto the external world. If you can accept that the flower is really just a flower, nothing more, then your life becomes simpler. You become more at peace, you're able to clear your mind...and that puts you on the path to enlightenment.

Which is all fine in theory.

Except that to me, that sounds an awful lot like skipping out on the process of LIVING life. To me, the whole point of being here is to enjoy things. If a sunset is beautiful, well then I'm going to sigh over it! I love to FEEL life, really love it and live it to it's fullest....and this whole Buddhist philiosophy to me doesn't seem to match that.

I said this to the monk, whose response to me was "well the Buddhists would say that you have a lot of dukkah if that's what you need". If I need to live the 'hollywood' life, as he called it, then there's obviously something missing inside. If I need to turn to the external world for satisfaction, then I'm not in balance, not achieving anything close to enlightment.

Maybe so. But I think I'll run the risk of missing enlightenment if it means I get to laugh a lot.