After Vipassana

It's been a while since my last entry. This past Sunday I returned from a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. It was my third in three years. It was done sitting in complete silence for 9+ hours a day, for nine consecutive days. On the tenth day, the "veil of silence" was lifted and we were allowed to speak with our fellow meditators. This was interesting. All these men (women were in different quarters, though we shared the same meditation hall) with whom I had been eating, showering and peeing next to for nine days, whom I had speechlessly observed (and they me), whose habits and mannerisms I knew - some I had even assigned names to, like "the old soldier, an old guy who marched up and down constantly during every break, or Samson, one of my roommates, very tall and very solid man with full-bodied long, blond hair - I finally got to speak with them. It was like I knew them already except that I didn't. Sampson turned out to be a sculptor. I regrettably didn't speak with the old soldier, hence never learned if he'd been a soldier. He was too young to have fought in WWII and probably too old for Vietnam (the Hungarian Vietnam veterans fought on the North Vietnamese side, they got to win).

After the course, some of us went to a nearby Buddhist stupa, a sort of Buddhist shrine built in memory of