‘My’ 7 Years with Vipassana
For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom, nor for the uncontrolled is there the power of concentration; and for him without concentration there is no peace. And for the unpeaceful, how can there be happiness?1
Somewhere in between a thought, whether somewhere out exists a reality, in which someone severely neurodivergent misreads body language and begins making out with a person who is, in fact, choking and fighting for their life, and a thought of pocket universes filled with tiny mythologies of Italian brainrot, in between all that, there is a string that plays a melody of the spheres, if attuned perfectly to a calm and equanimous mind.
The melody is held in the air as if suspended in time, and post factum I think that, in fact, “you are the music as long as the music plays”2 actually, and imagine this is how Dante’s Heaven must feel. And I also think it does not matter, because everything changes, and every heaven has a snake, and snakes aren’t scary because of malice, but because they move in an unnatural and uncanny way, as if someone mutilated a lizard and it turned evil as result.
The mind wanders away. The lizard reminds me of a dream I had tonight, where three parties stand on some kind of non-Euclidean staircase and hold each other at gunpoint, simultaneously representing three different scenarios, as if they were tripled into movie clips not yet played, but made to make one Understand, a configuration that made sense only in my dream, I guess… Long-barreled revolvers hang heavy between them. One party has a cowboy hat on a reptilian visage and a scale-covered body; another resembles a neo-noir vigilante cloaked in black leather. The one in the middle is a woman dressed in white, arms stretched to both sides with guns, holding a little flask on a necklace string. I Understand that the flask contains an elixir—a remedy for some type of lizard disease—which the two others want to obtain for mutually exclusive reasons, the reasons probably relating to the well-being of the reptilian species. I don’t dream long enough to see who pulls the trigger first, or to find out the content of the elixir, but I know the woman in the middle is to make the decision. As I wake, I mutter: “virgin tear brandy” — (?).
I do my body maintenance and sit to write. It’s been exactly 24 hours since I came back from a 3-day Vipassana meditation retreat and tried to settle into everyday life again. It’s been 7 years since I went for a 10-day course for the first time, when I reached the ripe age of 21. It’s been 7 visits to Vipassana centres over 7 years. It’s been 777 hours of meditation since then (I’m making up numbers at this point).
To write about Vipassana is a logical conclusion to the last five Substack posts, which illustrate my journey of public self-discovery, my exercise in sincerity, yet even if the ‘journey itself is noble, the problem with the never-ending journey is that you can never settle’3, and if ‘it is impossible to theorize a historical moment while living through it’4, yet clearly, ‘some ideas are aesthetically superior to others’5—like the ‘societal emergence from some type of collective autism’6 over ‘spiritual exercises in style conducted outwardly’7.
Sharing the knowledge and experience outweighs the secret allure of digging your own tunnel in private, and after years of shovelling, I am ready to invite some people over.
This path of meditation was introduced to me by a variety of people. There was a ‘pure-hearted Indian man’8 who suggested I try meditating when I was in New Delhi on a high school exchange programme, after I said I was interested in Indian spirituality at the end of my stay. I might have been 17 back then.
I remember Yuval Noah Harari mentioning Vipassana in a podcast I listened to at the age of 20, undergoing the Harari-effect—which is feeling exponentially smartened after reading one of his books for two weeks up to a month. He said he “would not have written any of his books if not for his practice,” and I felt enthralled, because I respect people who are good at connecting dots within our existing reality; I do not share the same amount of respect for people who multiply realities to connect some dots, therefore I abstain from most conspiracy theories and alternative knowledge. Vipassana seemed like a course of pure technique, devoid of fairy tales and fabricated belief systems—not structured around one deity or another, but rooted in your own independence and the dignity of your own hard work. There was no other way to understand it than to go through the 10-day voluntary prison camp; I signed up for a course a year later, two weeks after my 21st birthday.
Verily, monks, whosoever practices these four foundations of mindfulness in this manner for seven years, then one of these two fruits may be expected by him: highest knowledge here and now, or if some remainder of clinging is yet present, the state of non-returning.9
Unfortunately, for a simpleton like me, who lives a secular life in an urbanized area, and the path to the highest knowledge is much longer—if it is even achievable in this lifetime. But what is achievable is gaining unprecedented insight into how your mind-body golem operates.
The premise of the course is to practice ‘insight’ in isolation. Vipassana means ‘insight,’ to “see things as they are.” You give away your phone, books, cigarettes, any substance you like to abuse, and the permission to speak. You stay alone with your clothes and thoughts, voiceless for nine days. You do not exchange looks with other people, just peacefully hover around them as they are deeply locked in on watching their breath, until you are allowed to speak on the penultimate day of the course.
You wake up at 4, have two meals a day. A day feels like a week, because you’re focused on every minute of it, and you feel like you’re moving through time in slow motion, until, at some point, time starts passing through you. A disembodied voice hums from the speaker, gently telling you what to do. The teacher’s voice arrives through pre-recorded tapes, guiding the meditation step by step, the voice of S. N. Goenka, a chubby and jolly Burmese businessman-turned-yogi who popularized the practice over his lifetime, pilgrimaged to the West, and readjusted the course for the understanding of victims of Enlightenment like us. Goenka-ji died in 2013 and left behind a group of assistant teachers, present during courses to provide additional guidance and respond to questions. There’s no point in saying Vipassana is not a cult, because that’s exactly what someone in a cult would say. But it’s not.
The schedule is the same every day, the same in more than 200 centers around the world, refined over the last 50 years on a few million participants. There’s something oddly comforting in knowing you’re entering a trusted, well-established pyramid scheme rather than a ragtag conglomerate of spiritual crooks set up overnight.
It is a worldwide exercise in surrender. You are hatching an egg within yourself. You might feel like leaving when it gets tough, but it’s strongly advised against—and for good reason. You can’t opt out halfway through an operation, an open brain surgery. There’s an unspoken pact to split your skull wide open—and the strange beauty is, in the end, everyone gets to the same stage. The uniformity of Vipassana’s schedule made me realize the universal, made me believe in some kind of emotional realism we all share.
Universal Human Nature
Mentioning biology and evolution makes social academics cringe, as if “where we come from” refers solely to societies of control or the early days of mercantilism, and not tree branches; human experience is too rich to disavow a discipline for its past sins. I wonder if I can bring my craniometer into a club. My calipers10. I wonder if I can maintain both your attention and mine, if I can lock our minds in this economy, and bring them very close, and connect bellybuttons.
I believe in a mind-belly problem: that my gut tries to communicate with me through various types of signals, as if I carry another brain within me that is mostly at peace—unless I get freaky in the sweet treat section. Someone might have told me that making a point has more appeal when I prime it with a personal anecdote.
Between the ages of 19 and 23, I spent my time reading pop-sci and, eventually, more niche books—on what it means to be human, or maybe what consciousness is, or how evolution works. That reading phase accompanied a wide spectrum of lifestyle experiments, from the very healthy to the very much not, regarding substances, routines, schedules, boundaries, permissions, obligations, regulations and expectations. I’ve felt like I was on the verge of revolutionizing science, and I’ve also felt like I was about to lose my fucking mind for good! - the vicissitudes of being in your early twenties.
What I took from those books is this: we don’t know much about why11.
But we do know that the mind is an assessment tool—it judges incoming stimuli from the five so-called ‘doors of perception’, and from the sixth - our imagination.
These stimuli might come from what's happening right now, but also from memories or daydreams of the future, when the mind drifts off into the Default Mode Network12.
The labelling of those inputs takes place along a pleasant/unpleasant spectrum and manifests in the body—as a strong or subtle sensation. That feeling loops back into the brain13.
This process happens automatically through association, and the rationalization of why we reacted a certain way only comes later. There are plenty of studies involving placebos and seizure patients that suggest we often make up stories to explain our actions after the fact14.
These embodied rationalizations get stored as traumas, opinions, preferences or taste. They accumulate into what we call a personality.
Some of them are like drawings in the sand and fade quickly; others are carved into rock and haunt you forever.
The stronger the link, the shorter the circuit to a reaction. A small thing can get someone all fired up.
We know this is how we store memories—labeling things to avoid, things to attract—so we can navigate the social world. This is the process of sense-making. And the beauty of it lies in the enormous role emotions play—a view that stands in stark contrast to the Cartesian model of the mind, which elevates ‘rational thought’ as the supreme function.
This is also how I’ve come to view dreams: as part of the same emotional labeling process, only this time it’s disrupted, unfinished, and needs to be reenacted in sleep. Dreams are often anchored in specific situations that, I believe, are conjured from fragments of memory to make you feel something. I don’t believe in the randomness of dreams—only in our lack of understanding, and in our lack of self-awareness.
Out of this process, somehow, consciousness emerged—a fusion of multiple phenomena, of the narrative self, the en-clothed self, and other theories of mind wrapped up in the so-called hard problem—all of them circling around the concept of awareness, the subsymbolic alertness of your mind15.
These theories are just a few among many and surely they are simplifications. But this is the framework I’ve internalized—simply because it became
Wisdom Acquired Through Lived Experience.
The fantasy of a metalanguage—or of absolute truth—is precisely where faith comes in. But what happens when you experience pure awareness? It does not require faith, to feel the minimal self, to close all the apps and return to the home screen, a mind quietly running in the most default mode, awareness aware of itself. That state, achieved through sheer focus and not through psychedelic substances, is what made me choose a metaframework that offered something others could not: a momentary escape from thinking in frameworks altogether.
That’s one reason why an experiment bloomed into seven years of commitment.
Escape from the metaframework is possible through lived experience, but it cannot be conceptualized. Within what can be conceptualized, I found harmony. Through Vipassana, I learned that many of the so-called “recent discoveries” of Western science, listed above, align almost exactly with the teachings of the Buddha from 2,500 years ago. More importantly, those teachings come with a tool to disentangle and actually let go of the chains of association—something modern therapy and medication often fail to do, and a part of me devoted to the practice would even say, fail to do entirely.
The only caveat is that it requires sacrifice, the sacrifice of time and comfort. Ten days might seem like nothing to a medieval journeyman riding a cart to a neighboring country, or to an elderly person whose days and weeks blur into one, but to someone with a strict digital routine, it can feel like forever. If you don’t yet find refuge in yourself, in your own mind, then ten days alone with it might feel like the worst family dinner that lasts for eternity.
If you manage to endure the enforced solitude of the course, the technique itself is repetitive and monotonous—but not complicated. It begins with sharpening your awareness during the first few days by simply observing your breath, specifically, the area just below your nose and above your upper lip, the Cupid’s bow. During this time, your attention becomes so sharp, and your mind so calm, that you rarely get lost in thoughts; they still arise, but are much easier to watch—like clouds drifting by, a peaceful sight you have no urge to disturb.
After a few days, your mind sharpens further, and you begin to notice tiny sensations in that triangular area, you notice itching, pulsating, throbbing, tingling, and so on.
When the day comes to begin the actual Vipassana technique, you're instructed to move your attention to the top of the head and then slowly scan down through each part of your body, shifting your focus as soon as you feel a sensation, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. You suddenly realize you can feel your whole body—that there is always some subtle sensation, everywhere, all at once.
Progress is measured not by how many sensations you detect, but by how unbothered you are by them—by how equanimous you remain in the face of bodily phenomena, whether pleasant or painful. The direct benefit for self-esteem is that the course rewires your notions of success and defeat.
But there’s more to it—there’s the cessation of pain, the dissolution of the body-mind structure, the emergence of a pure point of awareness. These are the states you begin to reach toward the end of the course, on Day 8 or 9, the altered states that are partly ineffable, and partly irrelevant, because you’re not supposed to react to them any more than you’re supposed to scratch an itch.
The beauty—and the simplicity of the technique—lies in the uniformity of structure of perception and reaction. 1. Observing an itch, without scratching, 2.resisting the urge to violently kick a piece of furniture after you trip on it, 3. noticing the swell of tension before an argument with your mother as you quietly reach for your verbal sword - if cautiously observed, all of them pass in the same manner. They dissolve, replaced by something one person might call inner peace, and another, homeostasis16.
“Should I ever scratch?” I ask the Assistant Teacher one day. I’m met with the kindest smile.
This is the gist—as much as I can reveal without spoiling too much. The rest, you’d have to see for yourself—cross-legged, cloaked in a veil of anxiety, until you trust, and until you surrender.
The Aesthetic Event
Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something. This imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic event.17
The phenomality—or rather, phenomenon—of Vipassana is that silencing your thoughts, and also the mere awareness of bodily sensations without reaction, allows for an unfiltered, raw aesthetic experience of reality.
I feel I need to clarify this for a friend, with whom I had a long, circling conversation about aesthetics vs. ideas: I do not mean the experience that has been conceptualized as “Why do I like this?”, but rather the prior, solitary encounter with the sensation itself, or rather, with its immediate physiological imprint. When you first admire a landscape, and then speak of it, or even think of it, the experience shifts—from the mute immediacy of the emotional aesthetic into the domain of language and narrative. There’s beauty there too, in the textual and in the conceptual, in the frameworks we choose, in the metaphors we reach for, but the unfiltered aesthetic experience is different; it is mute, and it is alive, like light through leaves.
At the beginning of it all, there is nothing but change, pure awareness of being, which only then becomes a feeling, and only later, a concept. That is the order of things. The aesthetic experience, being the poetic experience by homology, is what I understand as surrendering yourself to a feeling. What you do at Vipassana is stop at the very first stage, before it even becomes a feeling or an emotion—the stage of sensation, of the most delicate change and vibration in your body, that even precedes the ‘imminence of a revelation’.
The realm of being outside of language can, of course, be achieved independently of a torturous bootcamp, yet a 10-day exercise in being focused can prolong it into minutes and hours, and allows you to get there sober, with your own strength. You start the course by stopping to think and exiting the linguistic; you end the course by exiting the emotional, the domain of aesthetics into pure awareness, which distorts the perception of space and time…
I do sound a little kooky here. Simply put, Vipassana is good for me, because it clears my mind and lays groundwork for sharp, creative, focused thinking - but most importantly because it is good for others.
Put psychonautic perceptions aside and focus on what stays, on altered traits and not altered states. On my second course, an old man with a bad hip told me that I should come here for the betterment of others, and not myself. If you come back calm, you make your whole environment calmer. This snapped me out of a self-perfectionist, autistic loop I landed in after the first course, and could be the only advice to give if anyone reading this would ever want to try. And to persist until the end, and surrender, because the results can be observed first-hand, and sooner than expected.
My Personal Benefits
In the end, I’m just trying to be a good person, with better or worse results. I have broken hearts, and had my own heart broken more than once—and that made me understand, and feel, when they sing:
I’ll sit alone and think a lot about you
And wonder if you’re ever coming back to me18
and when they sing:
I've got a broken heart and you can't break a broken heart19
and when they write:
If the heart could think, it would stop beating.20
I think that I would be in a much bigger mess if not for meditation. There are benefits for myself and for others. There are benefits for ants, spiders, bugs, beetles, moths, centipedes, wasps, termites, flies, gnats and roaches. Since I started meditating, I have not deliberately killed a living being. I apologize to the trees, to the birds, and to people.
If there is a vice I honor, it is pride—and belief in the importance of what I stand for, stubbornness, the endless source of arguments. The pride of being a 27-year-old who gives Icarian wings to a spoken word. And another vice: to demand an awful lot from myself, and an awful lot from others. And other vices of youth—of thinking too much, and thinking that reality can be contained and controlled, while watching it seep through my fingers.
To have someone I admire come to me and tell me that what I paint and write is crap, and for me to be unbothered by it, even remain joyful—that is the end goal.
The qualities honored by Vipassana, by dhammaism, align with the qualities of Jesus, and any saintly person who believed in the superiority of love and compassion.
Indifference through self-observation does not mean the domain of intense feeling becomes inaccessible. It means you have more control over when, and if, you want to be consumed. Life can still take you by force—but I don’t like when that force is romanticized, as if suffering or extreme joy were ever necessary for the experience of beauty. They’re not; and you can take a hold of them, with enough hard work. The path of meditation is laborious and boring, until it becomes the best thing that you’ve ever done for yourself.
*
The true beauty, for me, resides in the sublime, both in the simplicity of life
and in the polar opposite of it: the alchemy of thinking, which generates ideas pure and tender in their genius.
*
To hold one’s baby in your arms and to bury your parents—these are two eternal human sentiments that still await me, and may they come only when necessary.
I live in a world where I can sip on three beverages at once, and I am going to bring life into this very world, God be my witness.
*
Every time I meet someone new, I feel like I’m forgetting someone I once knew. I can be a citizen of the world, but I am a serf of my memory.
*
The pragmatist approach says that things serve their function, and then fossilize in collective memory. The biggest ripples in the cultural current happen when things are coopted, like Bartlebooth’s paintings.
*
I don’t believe in mass film productions radicalizing the public, even if the subject dances somewhere on the eat-the-rich spectrum, but there is one sociological truth those productions can brilliantly illustrate, and that is class realism.
The White Lotus
Class realism is the unvoiced theme of the newest season of The White Lotus, which traces the stories of families and couples ‘relaxing’ in an exclusive resort in Thailand. Plenty of the plots align well with the subject of this post: meditation, retreats, and the teachings of letting go—the laborious battle fought indefinitely by us folk. The core structural reveal, the striptease of White Lotus, is proportional to the impact of twists, cliffhangers, and other tricks of screenwriting, guiding the viewer to an epic finale and tying all the knots into a beautiful weave. The journey of the heroes follows the universal theme of self-discovery, and it enables both Lacanian and Buddhist readings—the former regarding things that remain constant, and the latter things that change.
Lacan’s constant is the infamous lack: the gaping hole in your identity that you try to fill in order to become complete. For Rick, that is his revenge; for Piper, it’s her one-year meditation retreat. Lochlan is a walking lack, a half-a-human—he tries to achieve completeness by pleasing his family members. The desired state is one of peace and safety, and the character of lack-induced drives depend on the starting point. It can demands committed action to achieve peace (as in the case of Rick and Piper), but if the desired peace is already obtained, it then demands a continuous effort to maintain it. Chloe sacrifices her integrity for financial comfort, and the way to protect that comfort is to fulfil her boyfriend’s fantasies. Laurie sacrifices her pride and her need for justice to maintain her friendship with her besties, who disrespected her on top of living much ‘better’ lives.
Lacan’s truth is that at the core of all relationships, there is a traumatic kernel—and it is your choice how to deal with it. Whether the kernel overwhelms you and puts you on a death drive, like it does with Rick or Timothy Ratliff (together with their significant others, as it is often the case), or whether you make peace with it by compromising your initial values, like Belinda or Laurie. Whether, like Gaitok, you sacrifice you innocence for swag.
The Buddhist constant is the lack of any constants—or rather, the idea that the only constant is change. That’s why it aligns so perfectly with Lacanian theory, becoming its spiritual extension. The Lacanian lack is precisely the truth of change, of anicca, which we learn at meditation retreats by observing all bodily phenomena come and go, indifferently.
The lack—the split in your subjectivity that always makes you feel incomplete, inadequate, or not enough, but also drives you to succeed, to love, to seek a better life—is the change itself. It introduces anxiety, because nothing can be protected or maintained, and little can be predicted about what is to come. The acceptance of change is tricky: when you cannot change external reality, you must change yourself, which is not always ideal, and not always easy. The stronger the drive, the stronger the effort required to keep yourself in check—that is how Frank finds refuge from drug orgies in Buddhism, and where Rick, acting on his revenge, fails and begins his own downfall.
Amor Fati, the title of the last episode, is the point de capiton, the anchoring signifier of the series. It retroactively gives meaning to the chaos, suggesting that all the characters—despite their flaws—must accept their destinies. It reframes survival and failure through a Nietzschean lens of fatalism.
But there is also the third, subsequential reading: after Lacanian and Buddhist understanding that the only unchangeable thing is the Lack - the change itself, comes the truth that there is a limit to change: you cannot escape your class. It is a consistent message I enjoy in Mike White’s series: that money corrupts, that there is hypergamy in dating, and that the rich are all the same. That is the class realism of the series: the fact that money allows for endless possibilities, and that you don’t want to limit your options, the core consumer preference, the driving force behind the fall of communist regimes. So you stay within your class, and entertain the life it enables. ‘It feels good to be rich’, says Red Scare’s Dasha, who has done a full 180 from being an edgy liberal to a full-fledged conservative over the last five years21. That is the sad truth—the truth of the ruling-class consciousness developed by Piper as she breaks down over breakfast, aware that there is no return from being spoiled.
The only people who remain integral to their values are the ones whose financial status did not change, whether the values are pure, like Pornchai’s - or corrupted, like Valentin’s. Characters who grow spiritually the most are those who became poor. The final scene of Timothy looking at the ripples in the water, reflecting on Buddhist teachings, shows him making spiritual peace with the ghosts of his past catching up to him.
Going to a Vipassana retreat is like locking yourself up in a three star version of The White Lotus, but with luxurious enjoyment replaced by hard work and silence. The teachings aim to let you become your own Lorazepam. I have faced my greatest enemy on a Vipassana course - me, myself in person, in a spooky halloween font. There are limits to honesty: I cannot disclose my traumatic kernels. But I can disclose where I am from.
Poland
I learn to accept things I cannot change, like my heritage.
To come from a country terrorized for centuries and torn to pieces every time it tried to rebuild a tradition is to live with a certain anxiety, and a certain complex—a master-slave dialectic of a need for acknowledgment. There are plenty of countries that share this with us: the feeling of a deep hurt that has not, and will never be, made right. The result is sadness and anger, an alchemic mix that turns into frustration. The mental structure of Poland is that of a sixteen-year-old who wants to hang out with the older, cooler kids. I will never be fetishised for being Polish. The astrological age of my zodiac sign is roughly the same, and I understand those sentiments of coming-of-age very well.
The damage of growing up in Poland is not really knowing the notion of community on a large level, and barely knowing the notion of fraternity—the wholesome aspect of being a bro, the male equivalent of a sisterhood. Not knowing it, because mutual trust is low, or maybe because of neoliberal erosion. Or maybe, because I was never a candidate for a bro, and couldn’t really vibe with bro-coded subjects—the ones eternally outside the self, like the gym, music, shoes, sports, like nerding out on a topic of choice, like sharing knowledge, endlessly. I don’t know how to converse with non-introspective folk—or even with folk who are curious and sensitive, but still don’t know how to vocalize it in their 30s (wtf!).
I remember feeling fraternity at the end of the Vipassana course, which is divided into males and females, when you’re finally allowed to speak, the day when everyone turn out to be completely different from how you had imagined them. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a sober MDMA trip: an unprecedented serotonin release after forced isolation, and a mutual recognition of shared suffering. When you learn that even the toughest, most focused-looking soldiers also had sleepless nights.
It’s an amazing feeling. I wish I could enter more scenarios where I have to go through some shit with a bunch of men (excluding war). Maybe I attend a football match, or some such foolishness.
I’ve sat courses in Poland, and I’ve sat in Nepal. In one field where bragging goes against the values, we wear the laurel: my dear home country has one of the most ideal Vipassana retreat centers in the world, as it was built specifically for that purpose—meaning, mostly, that it has individual rooms with private bathrooms. Many other centers are repurposed farms or hotels conducting courses all year long.
If I were to say what Poland is good for, apart for attending a meditation course, are the extremes of styling a life: it’s good the quiet, individual, introspective, focused time, and for the extreme partying. Both being, ultimately, exercises in loneliness.
I felt the longing for pleasure and abandonment inside me. […]
All we could do was exist for each other solely as a reminder of the self22.
I’m glad I grew up in a country that taught me how to be with myself. To love the shadow of the self cast on the wall, as I watch American content soaking in, and ponder. Alas, even if that’s the main thing it taught me—to like and be liked, to chat up and be nice, to go out and have fun—these are all things I had to teach myself, things collectively self-taught, in the long arc of trying to live free of worry, to accept where you’re from, in short: to live like Omensetter.
Omensetter’s Guide to Rawdogging Life
Omensetter lived by not observing—by joining himself to what he knew.
He knew the secret—how to be.23
This is the second time I’m writing about Gass, to my fine bewilderment. The perverted uncle Gass - so full of life that it went bad, rotten, and spilled, the shadow self of phlegmatic Sebald, who puts you to sleep with his countless, monotonous anecdotes; two masters of confusing the audience by, respectively, style and narration.
The 1966 book by Gass depicts a classic modernist motif: the struggle of worldviews embodied in two characters. A dialectic that asks for transcendence, or integration into the contemporary subject. Or, if you prefer, a portrayal of a barred, split subject—a subject who asks herself how to be in a world that is ever-changing, where everything seems right and wrong simultaneously.
Omensetter’s Luck tells a story of loneliness, the bleak inheritance of being thrust into a pair of anxious boots and sent trudging through a world of people smiling out of their faces.
It follows the story of Omensetter, who one day descends into the village from a muddy hill with his belongings strapped to a carriage and transforms it indefinitely with his charisma and way of being. If a man could be whimsical while tapping into the Divine Masculine, he would be it. His presence is a thorn in the soul of Reverend Jethro Furber, who becomes consumed by envy and hatred for Omensetter—his easy-goingness, his popularity. Furber is an evangelist of hate, of guilt and of mediocrity, and Omensetter is the force of life itself.
The novel masterfully captures the tension between Dionysian and Apollonian forces—the soul’s confusion in its impulse to condemn those who surrender too fully to pleasure or to joy. The mental disposition of the Catholic Church, and the comfort found in guilt.
It resonated with me, because it illustrates the two states I move between: Omensetter’s peace- when I’m on retreat, or actively practicing meditation, sitting for hours a day, for months on end, and Furber’s neuroticism - when I’ve lost my practice and spiral into the rollercoaster of a fast life laced with parties and drama. At times like that, I feel like a hero looped within a novel with magnitude, but no direction.
What pulls one back from the peace and joy is the weakness of the spirit. The desire to be perfect—the narcissistic drive of the modern age that some of us feel pulled into. The American curse, placed upon the world. Sometimes I think that with every positive personality trait comes a negative counterpart —sort of like the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of aging. A trait that helps you in some way, but trips you up just a little bit later, when you’re finally gathering momentum.
The desire to be perfect, and a Venetian Spritz. And a very vocal vice of viewing something you don’t do—or can’t do—as something you are against.
This is the wisdom of Gass’s novel: the trap of contrarianism developed out of narcissism. A hatred for tall people because you fell short.
[He] claimed one Sunday that the Lord had made him small, and had given him his suit of pulpit clothing, so he could represent to everyone the hollow insides of their bodies. […] One I was eight feet tall, he’d exclaimed, but God made me small for this purpose.24
Vipassana, to me, is an exercise in being at peace with life’s doings—especially when I spiral too far into Furber’s desire for control. The good old ego-building project is nothing more than cerebral torment: trying to erect an opinion on a foundation of self-doubt, building a dismal stump scaffolded into a shack that you nonetheless aspire to love. Maybe it’s the disease of people who think too much in thoughts, and not in landscapes or colors.
On some days, it couldn’t be more clear that ego is like the unfinished book in DeLillo’s metaphor—a
“hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer”—
a thing that invokes hate and shame and frustration, because it demands attention.
And yet, as DFW writes:
The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool—it's a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.25
The “cool” thing, then, is clearly not about perfection, but about accepting your deficiencies—as much as it is about coming to peace with the public output of your inner world, the resolution of Kenzaburō Ōe’s Personal Matter, the acceptance of hideousness not only within you, but also outside of you. Seeing both as equal, and equally yours.
While writing Omensetter’s Luck, Gass was buried in academic and philosophical alienation, deep in Wittgenstein’s disillusionment with language. Soon after, he would champion a style of inner singing, of rhythm and sweat. Gass is Furber. Furber is, in Gass’s words, “every academic he had ever known.”
[The Devil] fell, he was The Fall itself, the suicidal star; but he fell at the end of a fine elastic. It is the cord through which he even is fed and thrives.26
There are so many two-sided coins, so many ego-traps, lying in wait on both ends of the “spiritual” spectrum, exercises in humility that, somehow, still end up feeding your grandiosity—so perfectly aligned with the reward systems of today’s ecosystem.
Running an Instagram account for a living while trying to live a humble life is like trying to ride a bicycle through sand, that is why I need a practice that anchors me to a pillow for ninety minutes a day, every day, periodt. A practice that exercises selflessness—not in theory alone, but in repetition, in sweat and in silence, to enter a mental refuge where I can peacefully get a grip on recent developments.
The Recent Developments
There is always something amazing emerging at some cost, and the New, as rooted in opposition to the Old, needs a conscious, dialectical effort to harmonize both. There is short attention span and there is peak content of sorts, there is restlessness and endless fun of an endless scroll.
There are some incredible memes out there, oh brother…
The Campari Spritz and the irresistible urge to make a cultural commentary, even though the Substack community is so wonderful at reminding me that my opinion doesn’t matter, that I should know my place, and that attempts at cultural criticism are annoying27. Yet I cannot help but think of these takes as a Williamsian residual hegemony of millennials, who find in-group policing morally necessary; I can’t be more thankful for the current age, which leaves little space for self-righteousness and a whole lot for confused vulnerability, or vulnerable confusion, or some other Debordian wordplay. And I think that the line between criticism and being a hater is thin and often crossed, but we are getting there—to a place of recognition.
The quality of memes and tweets these days surpasses my expectations; on some days I cannot be more excited to compulsively screenshot and resend and repost. There is rising quality of textual memes. There is an automatic collective acknowledgement of Italian AI-generated characters, and there are videos debating whether they are halal or haram. There is a collective brainrot, the collective embrace of confusion and silliness in an attempt at escapism. We are truly living in times spiritually laced with ketamine.
If the sentiment is the return to the aesthetic by abandoning the language, then I need forced suspension in thinking and associating to stay in the realm of feeling, the realm which you can only describe as ‘beautiful’ before the language falls short. I have many girlfriends who are better at a ‘feeling’ and ‘looking‘, who can prioritize style over substance, which I can rarely entertain. I accept that; just because I don’t do it doesn’t mean I’m against it, or something like that.
Once every few sittings among serenity slides in this one unstoppable thought, like ladybugs doing backshots, like a fat golden pig rolled on its side, sleeping, like that ‘Heartbone’ would be a pretty cool name, like a memory of a French waiter saying ‘peanutz on ze table, like zis?’, like something nice (the euphoria of early summer) or like something awful, e.g. a painful memory branded on my brain with a heated iron of embarrassment.
My seven years with Vipassana… I have learned so much and I know so little. Early adulthood. Nodding off in a classroom, nodding off at a concert, nodding off at a movie screening, nodding off during meditation, which happens. I can’t help it!
Everyone has their own path, but everyone also shares the same emotional realism of processing, associating, categorising, reacting, and making a subconscious rule, as we peek through the doors of perception, half-open, half-closed, to leave us guessing.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to turn inward for the first time after a lifetime of looking outward, click here: https://www.dhamma.org/en/index. You might just find out how it is to carry the universe of peace within you.
If you have not, thank you for coming this far with me, still. You are a soldier. You and me will grab coffee one day and I will let you speak, indefinitely. The cosmic order will be restored, and the spheres will harmonize into a sweet melody, just like they did before I got distracted and thought of the Recent Developments, Omensetter’s Luck, being born in Eastern Europe, the odysseys and brutal redemptions of White Lotus, my foolish pride, the mechanics of enlightenment, Mind-Body loop, emotional realism, non-Euclidean dreams, and a strange and unsettling reality, in which someone severely neurodivergent misreads body language and begins making out with a person who is, in fact, choking and fighting for their life.
The Bhagavadgita.
Pretty sure I read that in: Critchley, S. (2024). On mysticism: The experience of ecstasy. Profile Books.
‘Lexical dream‘ from ‘How to be sincere’ post.
Satipatthana Sutta.
Thanks
for teaching me that word.The infamous ‘hard problem of consciousness.‘
The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a group of interconnected brain regions that are more active when the brain is at rest or not focused on external stimuli, and less active when engaged in tasks. It’s a daydreaming instrument.
The Somatic Marker Hypothesis.
The Left-Brain Interpreter.
Metzinger, T. (2024). The elephant and the blind: The experience of pure consciousness—Philosophy, science, and 500+ experiential reports. The MIT Press.
Damasio, A. (2018). The strange order of things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. Pantheon Books.
Borges, J. L. (2000). The perpetual race of Achilles and the tortoise (E. Allen, Trans.). In Selected non-fictions (E. Weinberger, Ed., pp. 261–264). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1946)
Jandek - "I’ll Sit Alone and Think a Lot About You”.
Daniel Johnston – "Silly Love".
Pessoa, F. (2001). The Book of Disquiet (R. Zenith, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Dasha Nekrasova on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll pod.
Kosinski, J. (1968). Steps. Random House.
Gass, W. H. (1972). Omensetter's Luck. New American Library.
ibid.
Wallace, D. F. (2012). The nature of the fun. In Both flesh and not: Essays (pp. 3–9). Little, Brown and Company.
Omensetter’s Luck.
I mean two Substack posts I stumbled upon, one called something like ‘why everyone in their 20’s should chill out‘. The other was Tao Lin’s post.
Calipers. A tool to some. An instrument to an artist.
And an object inseparable from its history of use in lobotomies...tung tung tung tung SHAHUR