A Buddhism Critic Goes on a Buddhist Retreat
October 15, 2023. In the summer of 2018, I went on a silent Buddhist retreat and wrote about it for Scientific American, of all places. Below is an un-paywalled, lightly edited version of that article. –John Horgan
I’ve been hard on Buddhism over the years, but I like to think I’m open-minded. So I recently put my skepticism to the test by going on a weeklong silent Buddhist retreat. The retreat rocked me. I’m still trying to make sense of it, but I’m going to take a stab at describing it, if only for my own sake.
The retreat took place at the Garrison Institute, a contemplative center on the Hudson River, about an hour’s drive north of New York City. The retreat’s leader, Lama Surya Das, is a self-described Jewish kid from Long Island, whose original name was Jeffrey Miller. A big man with a Buddha belly, he still speaks with a New Yawk accent. Das is a child of the Sixties, who as a young man headed East in search of answers.
He returned to the U.S. as a Lama, or teacher, specializing in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Dzogchen’s meditations, chants and doctrines nudge you toward enlightenment, the extraordinary state of being, and seeing, that Buddha supposedly achieved. According to Dzogchen, we are all already enlightened, we’re just too dumb to realize it.
Das is a kidder, who pokes fun at Buddhism, other teachers and himself. His mother, he says, calls him the Deli Lama. When he lists the four or six or whatever precepts or pillars of Dzogchen, he invariably forgets one, perhaps to let us know we shouldn’t worry too much about doctrine. He likes the Zen aphorism, If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him. Buddha, Das says, is within you, so any Buddha outside you isn’t real.
When Das leads us in chants, his voice swerves from a bass rumble to a squeaky falsetto. It’s a funny but effective way to get us to loosen up and chant along. When we meditate, Das urges us in a hypnotic murmur to let go of our cramped, fearful, grasping self and become our true self, which is big as the sky. That technique, like the chanting, eased me into pleasant, trance-like states.
On the first night, Das led us in meditation, talked for a while and took questions. (Students could only speak during these Q&A sessions.) I asked what he thought about the latest report of a prominent Buddhist leader accused of sexually abusing women. Das replied that scandals involving spiritual leaders aren’t unique to Buddhism, but they trouble him; he fears for the future of Buddhism.
To my surprise, Das asked what I thought; he did this often during Q&A, it turned out. I said maybe we should reject the idea that being enlightened makes you morally infallible. Yeah, or omniscient, Das said, no one is omniscient or infallible.
Lama Surya Das was born Jeffrey Miller in Long Island, New York. His mom calls him the Deli Lama. Buddhism isn’t true, he told me, but it works.
There were 30-some students on the retreat, old and young. They included (I learned when we broke silence on the last day) a rock musician, artist, human-rights lawyer, several psychotherapists and at least four engineers (one from Google, another from Microsoft). The retreat cost $1,800, including room and board.
Each day’s schedule, which lasted from 6 A.M. to 9:15 P.M., included 10 sessions of meditation, chanting, teaching or combinations thereof. Besides Das, three veteran female students led teaching sessions, which focused on how to integrate Buddhist practice into ordinary life. In addition to staying silent (except during Q&A), we were supposed to stay off digital devices and to read only books by Surya Das. These rules weren’t enforced, and I saw a few students looking at phones and non-Das books.
I went to every session the first day but skipped some sessions after that. I spent hours sitting on a bench overlooking the Hudson and lying on a lawn staring at the sky. Friends had warned that during the first few days I might struggle with self-criticism and painful memories, with sorrow and regret. That didn’t really happen, perhaps because I’m emotionally shallow. Plucked from the trappings of my normal life, I did see my vanity, insecurity and neediness in high relief, but these flaws seemed more comical than disturbing.
At the end of my second full day, I felt restless. I really missed my TV and laptop. Defying the ban on reading non-Das books, I checked out a library in the retreat center and spotted The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson is a mystic, I rationalized, so reading her will be like meditating.
After reading a while in bed, I realized that not every Emily Dickinson poem is as pithily perfect as “The Brain Is Wider than the Sky”; some are a little schmaltzy and whiny. So I set the book aside and lay back on the bed, wondering, What do I do now? The answer came: Don’t do anything, don’t even think, just be lazy. You know how to be lazy, don’t you? This was an inside joke. My girlfriend, “Emily,” likes calling me lazy.
Then I was lazy, really lazy. I felt like I was sinking into the bed. Thoughts arose, but they seemed silly, not worth thinking. I was resting on the bottom of a swimming pool, and my thoughts were vague, blobby shapes moving above the surface of the water. This metaphor is over-dramatic. My state of mind felt totally natural, so much so that I didn’t really pay attention to it; I was just in it. Then I fell asleep. I slept for seven hours without waking, which for me is great.
When I woke the next morning, part of me was still in that ultra-lazy state. Call it The Laziness. My thoughts felt slightly distant, as though they belonged to someone else. I was in a great mood. During meals and teaching sessions, the world was grinning at me, and I was grinning back. I felt like giggling, and at the same time tears kept welling up in my eyes.
At some point I thought, Hey, what’s going on here? I didn't feel as though I had discovered anything. I had simply noticed something there all along, or become something I already was. My reaction wasn’t Aha! or Wow! It was more a Duh or Homer-esque D’oh, like when I’m looking for my glasses and realize I’m wearing them. Except that metaphor isn’t quite right, because glasses are extra, artificial. A more precise analogy would be looking for your eyeballs and realizing they’re in your head: D’oh.
I was still giddy in the late afternoon when I met the Lama for a private, 10-minute session, which was part of the retreat package. I asked him, Can you become enlightened if you don’t believe in enlightenment? Sure, he said, why not. I’m a science writer, I said, a skeptic, who has written critically about Buddhism, but something weird is happening to me. Don’t get hung up on any particular experience, Das said, just stay open-minded, see what happens.
As I thanked him and said goodbye, tears welled up again. Then I crashed. I feared I had destroyed The Laziness by thinking, writing and talking to Das about it. But it came back that night when I stood on the lawn, fireflies flashing around me, and looked at the violet sky, where a half-moon hung between Jupiter and Venus.
I never felt as euphoric as on that day. Perhaps the initial giddiness resulted not from The Laziness itself but from my dawning belief that I had taken a tiny step toward enlightenment. After I had sex for the first time, I also felt euphoric, not because of the sex itself--which was awkward, and painful for my partner, who was also a virgin--but because I finally had sex!
But The Laziness never entirely faded. For the rest of the retreat, I felt like I could see more clearly, because my thoughts and emotions had become transparent. Things seemed charged with mythological import, especially when I was outside. The Hudson became The River. A path winding through woods became The Path. A brick wall was The Wall. A goldfinch preening in a pine tree was all the evidence anyone could want of Divine Creation.
The retreat convinced me that contemplation can reproduce the effects of psychedelics, a claim I have long doubted. On the retreat, as during a trip, I saw life’s inexplicability and improbability, which I like to call “the weirdness.” On psychedelics, the weirdness screams at you; on the retreat, the weirdness murmured. Imagine the perceptual state that inspired Emily Dickinson to write “A Bird Came Down the Walk.”
It’s considered bad form to talk too directly about enlightenment, and I understand why. As Dickinson said, some things are best seen veiled. But enlightenment, I decided by the end of the retreat, is banal. It means simply paying attention to, appreciating, each moment, no matter how mundane and annoying, as an end in itself, not as a means to another end, like making money or impressing people. Like, be here now, Dude.
Easy to say, hard to do. Most of us see our lives as a series of chores to be completed, not moments to be cherished. Is it worth devoting weeks, months, years to cultivating hyper-attentiveness? Is that the best thing to do with life? No. There is no best thing to do with life, and Buddhism errs in implying otherwise. Our craving for enlightenment makes us vulnerable to abuse by sleazy gurus. And seeking enlightenment is pretty self-indulgent. The world isn’t all fireflies and goldfinches. It has problems that need fixing, as I was reminded whenever I looked across the Hudson at the West Point Military Academy.
But I’m glad I went on the retreat. The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works. Something worked during the retreat, but what was it? My wishful thinking? A charismatic guru assuring me over and over that I am Buddha? Hours and hours of meditation, chanting, staring at clouds? Disconnection from the internet? Being caffeine-free (I quit for the retreat)? Who knows.
Now I’m back in the real world--which, given how much time I spend staring at screens, is more virtual than real. The Laziness is fading, becoming a memory, an idea. I don’t know what The Laziness is, and I’m suspicious of any explanation of it, Buddhist or otherwise. But I want to get it back, and sustain it, no matter what I’m doing. Grading freshman papers, waiting for the subway, watching Humans with Emily.
When I seek The Laziness, I am not living in the moment, I am looking for my eyeballs, but I can live with that paradox. I’m going to start each day by chanting: D’oh.
Further Reading:
Tripping in LSD's Birthplace: A Tale for Bicycle Day
The Ocean Is Getting on My Nerves
See also Chapter Five of My Quantum Experiment, titled “Laziness.”