Learning from Retreat

Since returning to the United States after spending five years in Spain, people are naturally curious about what I have been doing. I find it difficult to offer a satisfactory response because 21st century America does not seem to have the cultural context to understand a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth, peace, and integrity. The most accurate description of my time in Spain is that I engaged in a Buddhist retreat. But most people don’t know what this means. In conversation, sharing this information is like dropping a bomb: either it stirs up a mixture of awe and excitement, or it creates a social dead zone, leaving the listener dazed and confused, unsure about how to reply.

In America, someone who spends five years living on a mountain meditating every day conjures up images of hippies, eccentric hermits, and fanatics: people who are either admired for their rugged individualism and rejection of social norms or dismissed as irrelevant outcasts—dropouts of the “real world.” But, for me, solitary life was neither an attempt to assert my independence nor to abandon the world I grew up in. For me, living in seclusion was simply the most effective way of learning about life and about myself. It was a means to an end, a path to spiritual growth. I wanted to understand the world and this meant understanding my own experience of the world. Why is it that my brother and I can look at the same thing and have a completely different reaction? Why do my thoughts and feelings sometimes fail to reflect the reality that everyone else seems to experience? What is the nature of the self who is perceiving the external world? It was the insistence of questions like these that pushed me to find a quiet place where I could concentrate on finding some answers.

Most people feel that there are more pressing matters than analyzing philosophical problems and resolving existential predicaments. They just don’t seem all that important in the midst of crying babies, rising gas prices, celebrity gossip, and the general struggle for food, shelter, health, and happiness. But I have always felt that the biggest questions are the most important ones. How can we attend to the details if we don’t understand the big picture? How can we attempt to describe our self to others if we can’t answer the most fundamental of questions, “Who am I and why am I here?”

My work in Spain can be accurately described as a “spiritual” search. But I think this term is misleading because it carries a connotation of work that is unimportant and unrelated to our ordinary material lives. We feel that spiritual work is secondary to the demands of our corporeal existence, that it is a luxury that should only be indulged in when all of our other more immediate concerns are satisfied. However, this view fails to appreciate the immediacy and relevance of our spiritual nature. Although we rarely question our deepest beliefs and attitudes, they have a pervasive influence on all of our thoughts, words, and actions. Somehow, a person’s spirit shines through all the layers of habit, preconception, and culturally ingrained behavior. Our soul vibrates just beneath the surface of everything we say and do, informing and guiding our every movement. Spiritual experiences are not distant glimpses of transcendental truths but our most immediate contact with Life. Everything we do is a spiritual experience! How can the spiritual quest be considered irrelevant?!

In retreat I was motivated by profound questions like, “Who am I? What happens after death? What is our purpose? What is ultimate truth?” These thoughts served more as guidelines for directing my focus than problems that needed to be conclusively answered. As I probed and investigated I slowly started to realize that there were no definitive answers—to any question! A question exists in a context of meaning and interpretation and its answer depends on how those blanks are filled in. A question as simple as “Is it raining outside?” can have a multitude of meanings depending on how the terms ‘raining’ and ‘outside’ are defined. In everyday usage, the particular meanings of these terms are assumed to be mutually understood by the speaker and listener but it is only this common assumption that gives any question the pretense of a conclusive meaning.

The implication of this insight is that questions contain their own answers. There are no universal answers and no ultimate truths. An answer is simply a reflection of how one interprets the question. However, I also found that there is great value in searching for ultimate answers, despite the fact that they can’t be found. Its like going out for an evening stroll: you know that you will just end up back at home but that fact doesn’t negate the benefit of walking.

It is hard to convey the import and meaning of this understanding. It is well known in Eastern philosophy as nonduality, emptiness, or Tao but it is hard to translate into a Western perspective. Our tendency is to conceptualize it and confine it to a precise definition, but any definition is deceptive. It is a truth that cannot simply be known but must be experienced and lived.

People often ask me if I accomplished my goals in retreat. This is a difficult question to answer because there is not a clear “yes” or “no”. On the one hand, I did not experience all that I had originally expected to experience. (But when does life ever correspond to our expectations??). On the other hand, the retreat was successful because the process of looking for solutions (which weren’t found) led to a fulfilling inner peace and wisdom. It is like an explorer who attempts to sail to the other side of the world and, upon arriving, realizes that he has landed on the same continent from which he departed. He has not reached the destination that he expected to find and yet the journey was successful because it provided him with valuable experience: he learned that the world is round!

Like the earth, our subjective world is round. But knowing this is not enough; we need to directly experience it by earnestly seeking answers to our questions. It is not the answers but the seeking that causes us to learn.