60 days of silence

This morning I was reading Craig Mod’s Roden newsletter in which he touches on his first foray into Vipassana meditation and references Yuval Harari.

This article by Ezra Klein, an interview with Harari, mentions a 60 day silent retreat. When I read Mod’s article, it sounded like Harari does 60 days of the year, in silent retreat, not 60 days in a row. As a meditator, and as someone who has done numerous extended silent retreats in my life, as well as someone who greatly enjoys solo camping, it is easy to see the difference between these two.

I kept back tracking through Harari’s interviews, trying to find if this is really what he meant, that he spents two months out of the year in a silent retreat. Backing into a BBC article, I think it sounds like he did this once, not that he does this every year. I have trouble believing one would do 60 days every year, and that it would be as valuable to do this in a row, versus doing several silent retreats per year. In Vipassana, they usual is to do ten day retreats.

I do not practice Vipassana, but in my style of meditation, silent retreats means the brain is also silent, not just that you don’t speak out loud. I can’t imagine what 60 days of this would look like. I suppose, separate from 60 days of solitary confinement, where you are not there by choice and the brain ranges about doing and thinking anything it wants, this would not be torture. It’s hard to say. Perhaps hard enough that I’d like to try it.

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Tashi Norbu

In NYC I often lack others to meditate with, and there is something about sitting in silence with others. On days when I wish to share that space, I go to Tibet House. Once, there, a tiny older woman turned to me and said, “This is no longer done, in my country, it is no longer legal, we cannot simply sit together, to meditate. You have no idea what it is like to miss this as you have never had anything to miss.”

At the time there was an incredible art exhibit on the wall and the combination of experiences, the full room, the saturation of the images, was even more than the usual experience of communion.

 

 

 

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