Enlightenment Blues. Andre van der Braak

my life to him. At the same time I had firmly decided to marry my young love Carla, and I asked God for help in this matter. The inherent contradiction in this didn’t bother me. In church I sang my heart out, and I often experienced a sense of mystical awe. At eight-thirty in the morning, when the school Mass was over, I would walk from church to school feeling absolutely safe. God was my best friend who was watching over me.

      I was the oldest of four children in a middle-class family. I spent my youth in a small town fifteen miles outside of Amsterdam. I was a bright boy, good at school and sports, but socially awkward and often isolated. My isolation was exacerbated by the fact that I stuttered, and was often ridiculed by my peers. From the age of eight, I was hopelessly in love with my classmate Carla. I was an incurable romantic, a daydreamer. My romantic infatuation with Carla (unrequited) would last until I was sixteen.

      Because of my frequent stuttering I was sent to a speech therapist when I was fourteen. With her, I not only practiced breathing exercises and relaxation techniques, we also had long conversations. I was full of questions about God, about how we should live, about what was truly important in life. I didn’t want to lead what I felt was an ordinary life, where I would just decide on a career, then find a girl, marry, and have a family. I was looking for more. I wanted my life to mean something. I wanted to be immersed in higher matters.

      At sixteen, a classmate introduced me to Transcendental Meditation (TM), a system of meditation designed by the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. TM consisted of sitting quietly for twenty minutes twice a day, repeating a mantra that would take you to a deeper level of consciousness. At seventeen, I came into contact with the writings of the Indian sage and freethinker Jiddu Krishnamurti. His teachings took away the last remainders of my Roman Catholic faith. I went to Saanen in Switzerland to hear him speak in person.

      Krishnamurti spoke about the possibility of an inner freedom from conditioning, a life freed from illusion and ignorance by a transformation of consciousness. I was moved by his description of this ultimate possibility and decided that this was the only thing truly worth pursuing. Rather than studying mathematics, as I had planned, I decided to study psychology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

      After I had settled in Amsterdam, I went to a large spiritual center there and came into contact with various spiritual teachers, practices, and eastern ways of thinking. One of them was Advaita Vedanta, the Indian non-dualistic school of Hinduism, of which the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi is the best-known representative in the West. I was very fond of a Dutch teacher called Wolter Keers. He was a warm and unpretentious sixty-year-old man, who had held a high-ranking job in Brussels. He didn’t look like my idea of a spiritual teacher: he chain-smoked and looked like anyone else you would meet in the street. He had been to India, had studied with a guru there, and his identification with his ego had fallen away. His enlightenment had been confirmed by the famous Advaita Vedanta guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

      Wolter would teach me that,“Who you are can never be grasped by thought. Thought always functions in duality, in good and bad, high and low, real and unreal. It can never grasp that which is beyond all duality.”

      Time and again he would encourage me to give up trying to grasp with my mind what cannot be grasped. He would tell me to “contemplate deeply on the most basic feeling of being alive, the sense of ‘I am’. Then take away ‘I’, and take away ‘am’, and you’ll be free.” My illusion of being a separate self who was experiencing all kinds of things was the only obstacle to freedom, he said. Just see through that illusion and drop it: that’s enlightenment.

      Once when I was visiting Wolter at his home, he had to go out to the doctor for a back treatment. I stayed behind in his garden, reading a book of Nisargadatta. It was hot outside and I felt tired because I hadn’t slept much. Suddenly, while reading, everything fell away and I experienced a vastness I had never known before. My consciousness seemed to expand to embrace the entire universe, and I felt a deep peace. Nothing mattered anymore, everything was all right. I don’t know for how long I sat there. When Wolter returned home I went back into the house with him. As I walked up the stairs I suddenly felt dizzy and everything went dark. When I woke up I was in a hospital bed. I felt happy and at peace. Wolter and my parents were standing next to my bed, looking worried. They told me I had had an epileptic attack. Further examination in the hospital found nothing unusual, and I have never had an epileptic attack since. Wolter told me that such an attack can sometimes be an attempt of the brain to wipe itself clean. Whatever it was, it scared me to death, and for several months I didn’t dare close my eyes in meditation.

      But soon my longing for enlightenment was stronger than my fears. When a year later Wolter suddenly died of a heart attack, I continued my spiritual search in other directions. Buddhism was speaking about enlightenment as well, that it was the way out of suffering. The Buddha had spoken about the Eightfold Path, a system of ethics and meditation that culminated in insight and wisdom. I became an ardent practitioner of Buddhist insight meditation, or vipassana. This type of meditation is training in mindfulness, being completely attentive to what is happening in the present moment. By continued mindfulness we attain the three most important insights into the nature of reality: that everything is inherently unsatisfactory, that everything is impermanent, and that any idea of a self, or a fixed essence, is an illusion. These insights free us from craving and ignorance, and we come to rest in enlightenment.

      I became very involved. I lived in a student flat and at 6 a.m., when my housemates came home from a night of carousing, I got up to meditate. I practiced sitting and walking meditation for several hours a day and participated in meditation retreats of up to ten days. My Buddhist teacher gave me the Pali name of Suddhatta (purity).

      One of my meditation buddies was Harry, a 28-year-old Dutchman. He had also been a spiritual seeker since he was 18. He had been involved with the Hare Krishna-movement, had traveled in India for years, almost died from liver disease in the process, and had discovered Buddhist meditation practice while in India. He was also following gestalt therapy training, and we spoke a lot together about psychology and enlightenment. In my studies of psychology and philosophy I was looking for a synthesis between East and West. In 1986, I wrote my psychology thesis comparing psychoanalysis and Buddhist insight meditation, based on the ideas of the American thinker Ken Wilber. For my philosophy thesis I compared Nietzsche and Buddhism. But after graduation I yearned for a job in the real world, out of these high-minded theoretical realms. Since it was difficult to find a job as a philosopher or a psychologist, I started working as a computer consultant with NCR. I had worked with computers quite a bit at the university, and knew a lot about the Unix operating system.

      Slowly both Harry and I were becoming disillusioned with our Buddhist meditation practice. Did all this meditation lead to anything? What was enlightenment actually? Did it even exist? Our teacher seemed none too eager to get into all these questions. He just wanted us to continue the practice. When we heard stories about the dubious ways he related to his female students we lost faith in him as a teacher. Harry then heard about an unknown young American who was rumored to be enlightened by an Indian guru. He was teaching Advaita Vedanta and would be holding public gatherings in the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam. Maybe this would be the answer to our questions.

      1.3. Existential Crisis in Dayton: What Do I Really Want?

      For two weeks, I sit night after night in the living room in the Staatsliedenbuurt, mostly on a chair in the back. I’m still checking things out. I enjoy the silence; it feels as if my brain is being burnt away.

      Andrew is giving teachings largely through dialogue with others, about the Self, about the experience of knowing nothing and being no one. He talks about letting go of the ego so that we can become part of this deeper consciousness. The words seem to come straight from Emptiness itself. There is an atmosphere of silence, without pretense. Halfway through the evening, herb tea with a cookie is served. The very Dutch word “cozy” would almost be right here. I cherish this atmosphere like a warm bath.

      I don’t want to spoil that feeling by arguing with Andrew about his message, or losing myself in philosophical nitpicking. Actually I’m very shy for a reason unknown to me. Usually I have no problems finding words when it comes to philosophical and spiritual discussions. I feel somehow naked in this place, as if my deepest feelings are laid bare, at