Writing this in an effort to inspire faith (saddha) in myself and others. In 4 parts,

• My life as an atheist
• Ehipassiko, tasting the fruits of the Dhamma for myself
• My experience at my first meditation retreat
• What got me to believe in Right View

Part 1:

I spent the majority of my life as an atheist. Although I was born nominally “Buddhist”, as many Chinese people would attest, it’s more a mix called Chinese folk religion which melds aspects of ancestor/spirit worship with the ritualistic/supernatural beliefs of Taoism and Buddhism.

I never believed in any of that growing up and as a teen rebelled against that. I tried out Christianity for a brief period while attending a Catholic high school and it didn’t feel it fit me either. When I left high school, I read up on various religions - Islam, Buddhism… and even Satanism and rejected them all. Thus became my journey as a militant atheist for the next 23 years.

The works of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan became my ammunition, science provided the beautiful underlying mechanic and inquiring philosophy that helped made sense of the world.

Part 2:

When I was 38, separated from my ex-wife, I tried out online dating again for the first time in 12 years. I had a short-lived relationship with a kind, intelligent and extremely calm Indian lady and asked her how she is this calm. She attributed it to meditating an hour each day, which for me at that time, sounded like some kind of miracle in itself as I couldn’t even do 5 minutes of it before I felt like it’s too much. She mentioned how attending a 10-day silent meditation retreat helped her and I remembered being vaguely interested in attending one in my 20’s but put it off due to procrastination and didn’t come around to it.

When the relationship ended, somehow, it triggered in me this urge to give meditation a serious go. Starting from 5 minutes a day, I progressed slowly over several weeks adding 5 minutes to each day’s sit when I felt I was ready. By the time I hit 20-25 minutes a day, profound changes started happening.

I realized that I started speaking slower, in a good way. I’m an ENTP and like many others of this personality type, we tend to speak fast, sometimes too fast for our own good. Meditating regularly seemed to help me rewire my thought-to-speech neural pathway and I became a lot more mindful of my words.

After meditating more I became a lot more self-aware and this included bodily sensations. One evening as I had my daily sit, I felt this sense of anxiety that washed up like heat spreading throughout my body. If felt especially weird as I was sitting right under a fan and the fan did nothing to make me feel cooler. When I emerged from the sit, I wondered, where did this anxiety even come from? I wasn’t facing any major stresses in my life at that time.

I eventually made the connection that it was the coffee that I drank - coffee has been this constant dose of artificial anxiety in my life to get me amped up to do things I don’t otherwise feel motivated enough to do. This is why it keeps me awake, it triggers this prepare-to-fight response. I resolved to quit coffee and it was difficult. I suffered greatly from caffeine withdrawal migraines and lethargy for 2 weeks. Taking more naps and painkillers for the migraines helped me get through the worst and I’m now closing in on 4 years without coffee, after decades of being a coffee junkie. It was my meditation practice that helped illuminate the connection.

Bizarrely, I then lost my temptation for alcohol. I was quite the drinker and became a cocktail and Belgian beer aficionado over the years, mixing up my favourite drink (Sidecar) at minimum once a week and having beers whenever.

I had my last drink on 26 December, 2018. I had someone I knew from a dating app come over with her friends to help me finish my few hundred dollars worth of booze. I made dinner for them all and didn’t drink at first… but after some urging, temptation won out and I decided to have one Sidecar. Which became two, then three… and before I knew it, I lost count on how many I’ve had.

I remember waking up the next day feeling badly depressed. I just couldn’t understand how I’m feeling this way. I’m not hungover, I just had a great evening, my life is going great in many ways. But the depression was so bad I couldn’t even get up from bed. Was it always like this for me? That I would chase coffee the morning after drinking to suppress the depressing effects of alcohol? Now that I’m more aware of myself and not chasing caffeine anymore, it revealed how hooked I was on the drug cycle of alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol and caffeine are both intoxicants in their own way, and is used by society to make us more able to function with the stresses. Now closing in on 4 years without coffee or alcohol, I can clearly state how much better I feel. Meditation helped me get more in touch with myself and stop numbing myself from my own feelings and perhaps, the world.

This, is part of Ehipassiko, seeing the fruits of Buddhist practice in this very life, with immediate results. There’s no need to wait for some afterlife for proof that the teachings make sense and are beneficial. But, it goes beyond the mundane too and leads to results that extend beyond this life.

Part 3:

In 2019, I still wasn’t Buddhist and undertook meditation purely for how it improved my life. Therapy is expensive, sitting still for less than an hour a day - this I can afford. Encouraged by the results I’m already seeing, I became curious on how deep this rabbit hole goes. I signed up for my first 10 day meditation retreat, the same one that the Indian ex said she went to.

With an equal sense of excitement and trepidation, I found myself in Malaysia during Chinese New Year 2019 to embark on 10 days of meditating more than 10 hours a day and observing a strict code of silence. No Internet or access to my phone. No reading or writing. Just myself and my thoughts.

By the time of the retreat I managed to sit for 45 minutes a day, which I thought was impressive but as I was soon going to find out… my journey has really only just begun. The silence bit is quite an interesting experiment for an extrovert like me. I enjoy socialising and talking ideas out, how would I take days of not saying a single word?

Pain. Such pain. I ached in places I didn’t even know I could ache as I sat for hour after hour, day after day at the retreat. The first day was still alright, but as the days added up, so did my pain. I tried in vain to fix the pain, as I wondered to myself, would I suffer injury from sitting still for so long and enduring such pain? I tried to adjust the way I sit in all the postures I thought was possible. Adjusting my hands and arms, angling my shoulder and back this way and that, all in a vain effort to ease the pain even a little.

I battled other nasties too. I remember being so annoyed at these two people at that retreat. Both of them overweight, both snoring while in the meditation hall. Silently, I judged them from seats away. I remember one of them smuggling Milo from the food hall to drink throughout the day and having HUGE stacks of food on his plate for every meal. If I head back to my room to meditate, I sometimes hear him snoring so loudly I can hear him from two rooms away. Then if I head back to the hall… I find another loud snorer two seats away.

The Milo-smuggler from two rooms away left the retreat on the 4th day.

On the 5th night, while listening to the evening talk, I glanced up from my seat at someone who was leaving. It was one of the snorers, the one from two seats away. Our eyes made contact for a brief moment.

The next day, this person left the retreat too. I felt this sense of guilt - did he leave because of me, giving him a judgmental look? Apart from the guilt, I suddenly felt a lot of compassion for these two gentlemen. They are the ones that needed this retreat the most and are struggling immensely, probably both inside and outside the retreat. All my judgmental thoughts towards them vanished, replaced with a sense of guilt, shame and compassion. Sometimes, it takes people leaving for us to reflect on what we have done.

I struggled with nightmares every night I was at the retreat that got more horrific each night. On two nights, I was convinced I was visited by spirits as my door to my bedroom opened by itself late at night. I remember making sure the door was closed properly after the first time it happened and still, the door opened the second time… Thankfully I didn’t experience the door opening by itself for the 3rd time or I would have surely shrieked.

Apart from the crippling pain, getting focused was hugely challenging. I felt sometimes like my mind wandered a lot more here at the retreat than back at home. What I thought were long forgotten conversations got replayed. Songs. Things I should have done, could have done. What I wish I said but didn’t. Words I wished I didn’t say. Most of my sits were these battles with myself while trying to focus, and I felt like I was losing most of them. If I peeked open my eyes it seems like everyone around me were like quiet little peaceful Buddhas, while I, this imposter, sat here daydreaming about his life. Sometimes it feels like for the entire hour I spent sitting I maybe was focused for 3-5 minutes at most, rest of them spent mind-wandering while battling pain, snorers and… coughers! I remember being ticked off by these incessant coughers too until… one morning sit, I had an immediate taste of retribution and was uncontrollably coughing.

Despite it all, I made progress. I managed to follow the instructions and there were times where I did manage to get very good focus. Those little victories helped motivate me to push on. Secluded from stimuli and my usual dopamine hits, secluded from conversation, secluded from being an information and entertainment junkie, I finally got to process what was suppressed for decades. I remember reflecting deeply on all my romantic relationships and how I felt so grateful for every single one of them, regardless of how it turned out in the end. But, I remember then having this thought that I’m done with dating and romantic relationships… but life has other plans for me.

It all became too much on the 7th day. I was so frustrated with myself being unable to focus as well as I did back home. So frustrated with the aches and pain, nightmares at night, the mind wandering. I decided to stage a mini rebellion of one and on that morning, I decided to not meditate. I’m just going to sit there in the meditation hall, back slouched and just let my mind wander for hours, wherever it goes, not bothering to focus on anything. I spent hour after hour that morning doing just that.

After lunch and a nap, I was bored of my little quiet rebellion and decided to meditate again. I was surprised at how easy it felt this time to focus and I felt like I was able to focus for almost the entire hour of the first post-lunch sit. Bizarrely, letting go of needing to control my body to ease the pain, surrendering and accepting the pain on a deep level had me suffer a lot less from the pain. I still feel the pain, but I realized that one can feel pain without suffering from it.

I had a very focused, suffering-from-pain-free second post-lunch sit. I felt calm, at peace, without a want for anything. As I got deeper and deeper into concentration, I remember having this strange sensation like my seating position got shifted to face where the teachers were seated. If I opened my eyes, I was still facing front, at the edge of the hall. But when I closed my eyes to meditate, I would feel again that my seat is being rotated. I ignored this and continued meditating.

Then came this instruction to focus on the top of the head… and that’s when it happened. My entire field of view went from the usual hazy darkness while meditating with my eyes closed to being filled with this bright, white light. Smaller at first, then it expanded to grow larger and larger. I remember being able to “see” with my eyes closed while in this state, two beams of light emanating upwards from where the seats of the teachers were.

I felt this sense of bliss, joy, happiness, rapture, slowly but surely, increasing. But it doesn’t feel like the usual kind of happiness one gets from sensual pleasures, where there’s this “addictive” quality to it. This is a wholesome (in the highest sense of the word), non-addictive kind of blissful state which I’ve not experienced ever before. No chemical high or orgasm from sex comes close to how this feels. I was definitely still awake and wasn’t dreaming. In fact, I felt more conscious than ever, and I still felt concentrated and focused… but as the experience deepened, I no longer could sense my body. It was only afterwards when I emerged in hindsight, that I couldn’t hear either as one of the first things I noticed as I emerged was the whirring of the electric fan.

As I no longer could sense my body, there can be no noticing of breath or other sensations. Pain or even pleasure aren’t a thing anymore. But I was definitely still alive, fully conscious, aware and still seeing this bright white light. It didn’t stop expanding, and from what could be imagined as the area in front of my eyes, I started to “see” this white light in all directions. It’s as if I developed vision that didn’t involve my eyes or any part of my brain that normally deals with vision. I just felt utterly at peace with the world, existing in a state that defies the mundane restrictions of what being tied to a physical existence entailed.

The experience got deeper. From merely “seeing” this white light in all possible directions, this “room/space” that I was in expanded to infinity in a way that I could feel. Words cannot explain how this state feels as there’s nothing in our normal experience that’s anything close to this. I could feel this infinity of space. It’s not visual, it’s not dark. It’s bright and it’s visceral.

As I dwelled in this state, time also became less and less of a thing. The perception of time, lost its meaning and I couldn’t tell how long I’ve stayed in that state. But slowly, I began to emerge from that state. I felt my existence in the world again, I felt my body, I could hear and smell and see the usual hazy darkness behind my closed eyelids. That blissful, rapturous feeling left, and I’m back in the meditation hall, sitting on my cushion feeling calm and peaceful again.

It’s as if I’ve exited the Matrix, seeing glimpses of reality that’s beyond what the simulation presented me and I’m back into the simulation again. In a state of confusion I opened my eyes and people were still around me sitting on their cushions meditating.

What. Happened. I was so confused and utterly speechless. Even if there’s no code of silence I wouldn’t be able to speak about what happened for a while. The time came for us to leave the hall for a break and as I walked in the sun again, I felt so happy. I felt like I’m ready to die at any moment and what this meditation retreat really is for is to prepare for our deaths - and I’m okay with it all. In a strange way, I felt like I just attended my own funeral as I walked.

The rest of the retreat went by without incident and everything felt easier. The sits felt effortless and I could concentrate for the entire hour. In fact not just the sits, there’s this calm abiding feeling that accompanied everything that I did from waking to sleeping. The nightmares stopped. Aches and pain didn’t bother me. When the time came when the retreat entrants could speak to each other, I didn’t feel like describing what I went through. It felt at that time, something I had to process and I couldn’t find the right words then anyway.

When I came home, I around for information about what happened. The closest I came to were reports of Near Death Experiences (NDE), and even though I can relate to a lot of what NDE accounts contained, it still wasn’t close enough to what I experienced. It took months - but I eventually found literature that described my experience very well. It’s in the Pali Canon of Buddhism, where the experience of jhana is well understood and appears frequently throughout the suttas.

The skeptical side of me won out and I still wasn’t convinced enough that Buddhism is real. It got me curious enough to want to deepen my meditation practice though and I attended two more retreats that year. During the end of the second one, I spoke to one of the senior students from Myanmar and he said that if I’m curious about jhana, I need to seek out Pa Auk Sayadaw. And it’s during this retreat that got me to accept Right View at that point as a working hypothesis, but in a way I didn’t expect…