I wasn’t thinking about any of the big questions as an adolescent, but I had a really rough time of it socially when I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. After school I’d come home and lie on my bed and listen to the Top 40 on the radio, and the words of the songs spoke to me about where I was at. They were sad and asking why you didn’t have a boyfriend and saying how wonderful it would be to be in love. The songs were very melaneholy and I was very sorry for myself. Life seemed so wrong. I didn’t feel that people liked me. I was lonely. I had been successful in school up to thirteen, and then my grades just plummeted. I lost all my self-confidence. There seemed to be such an emphasis on how people looked, and I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t fit the image of the ‘popular girl’ so the boys didn’t go for me. I just shrivelled up even more. And the songs were like my only friends. They understood me a bit.
When I went to college looks stopped being the all-important thing, and I started to feel more comfortable about myself. It seemed like I had a personality that was worthwhile. And I even got some boyfriends, so things really began to look up! I started to have a good time – but not thinking about what I was up to. It was cool to be an atheist, so I was an athiest. I was going to parties and drinking beer like I was making up for lost time. Four years! After I left college I went to Kansas City and worked for Hallmark Cards as a graphic artist. I was doing well in most people’s terms – I had a good job, I was making good money, I had a nice apartment and a car and nice clothes. I was going out on dates. I’d become ‘attractive’. I’d got all the things that as a girl I’d thought were important. I got to travel a lot in the States and Europe, and finally wound up married at 27 – because it was the next thing to do, and it kept my Mum quiet! So finally I had a chance to find out what it was all about. I began to question what it was that I’d got, vaguely at first, and then more seriously as my relationship with my husband began to go downhill. It was like I’d finally done it – all the things that are supposed to make you happy, even getting a husband. And I wasn’t. It hadn’t worked. I was in a bad way. I used to just lie down on the sofa and curl up and things would get very dark. I just didn’t want to deal with it at all. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I would get very angry and scream and throw plates. I was very difficult! We were living with my husband’s parents in North Carolina, and they didn’t like me at all.
My lifeline was a man I was working for at the university who I could talk to a bit, and he started talking about the possibility of feeling some inner strength and not just being pushed around by other people’s expectations and disapproval. And someone else told me about Transcendental Meditation, which was at that time all the rage in the States. So I thought, ‘Oh well. I’ll try it.’ I did the weekend initiation and learnt the technique. And I remember looking in the mirror the day afterwards, and I really felt different. I felt a real calmness. I liked myself. I felt warmly towards myself for the first time for a long time, maybe for the first time ever. I felt still, and accepting of myself And that experience made me want to practise the meditation hard, which I did. I faithfully did my 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening for two and a half years without fail. Then I started to feel it had lost its value in some way, like, whatever it was good for, I had got it. And I had a sense there was more than the calmness and relaxation I was getting from TM. I started asking people about other kinds of meditation to see what there was.
I went to a weekend retreat in vipassana (insight) meditation, where we just sat watching the rise and fall of our breathing, and walking very slowly. And I found it the hardest thing of my life. By Sunday I was ready to explode. It was so simple, what the teacher was asking us to do ... and I couldn’t do it. And that really showed me something, the fact that it was such a challenge. I hated it, but the challenge absolutely intrigued me. I was hooked. He talked about the importance in everyday life of awareness, of waking up to life and living fully. Many of the things he said felt so inspiring and so right. And I wanted the kinds of things he was talking about. I just dived in and started doing lots of retreats and sitting every day. I started having some of the experiences Buddhism talks about – really seeing into the reality of who I am, and beginning to understand why things had been so difficult. Simply that a thought is just a thought, and I don’t have to get all caught up in it. There is a way out of all the suffering, as Buddhism says, and I was experiencing it – in glimpses. It was mind-blowing. Right here, in this day and age, it is possible. Not 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught but here and now it is possible to see the end of suffering.
Several of these quotations, as well as showing the power of person-to-person contact and example, also suggest that people may be predisposed, perhaps only unconsciously, to Buddhism as a result of encountering real unhappiness in their lives that the conventional solutions and distractions don’t provide satisfying answers to. Sooner or later they are touched by an experience of distress that seems to open their eyes to the great weight of ‘suffering’, as the Buddhists call it, that the world contains. The author of No Boundary, Ken Wilber, suggests that unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of inadequacy or mental illness, but of a growing intelligence,
a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense – to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided … It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions and enchantments that we agree not to question the root cause of our [troubles] ... But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail in their soothing and concealing purpose and, as a consequence, we begin to suffer.
For James the process started while he was still at school; for Mary it was her father’s death; for Theresa the unhappiness and depression of her marriage. For some people it is not until they themselves are ill, or old, or close to death, that the questioning begins to start. For many it is some kind of personal brush with distress that cannot, this time, be shrugged off.
It is interesting that it is precisely this dual impetus – waking up to suffering, and encountering someone who seems to deal with it better than we do – that got the Buddha himself started on the intense six or seven years of enquiry that ended with his ‘enlightenment’ under the bodhi tree at Bodhgaya in Northern India, and his discovery of the insights that now form the heart of all Buddhist teaching. According to the myth of Buddha’s life, he was born into a rich family to a father who was determined to shield him from any possible problems or unhappiness. He grew up with every conceivable luxury, and it seemed that his father’s plans were working out well until, one day when Buddha was out in the town, he saw a sick person, lying uncared for in the street, an old person, and a dead body, and these suddenly brought home to him the existence and the inevitability of suffering. But on one of his jaunts he also met a wandering monk, whose inner peace in the face of all this unhappiness impressed him greatly, and inspired him to set out on his quest to find the deepest, most lasting solution he could to the problem of suffering. It is partly the fact that there are people around today, Western as well as Eastern and female as well as male, who appear in some subtle way to have ‘cracked it’, just as Buddha did, that accounts for Buddhism’s growing appeal.