I want to share with my readers (as I have done on other occasions) something written by the magnificent Italian journalist and writer Tiziano Terzani, about his Buddhist and meditative experience.

This chapter comes from his book "A Fortune-Teller Told Me," which I wholeheartedly recommend, and which I think will interest those people who, like me, keep searching, reading, and experimenting with this thing called meditation.

Given the length of the piece, we have decided to publish it in three parts. Here is the first.

THE CIA MEDITATOR

And so, I too was capable of it. Still as a stone, seated on the floor with legs crossed and hands at navel height, one resting on the other, palms turned upward; back straight, shoulders relaxed, eyes closed.

I thought only of the tip of my nose, searching for that instant when the breath, slow and light, moves in and out until it touches a precise point on the skin. Like that, one hour after another. One day after another: without uttering a word, eating vegetarian food (the last meal before midday), moving slowly, trying to be conscious of every gesture, every thought, every sensation.

Meditation: I had spent half my life in Asia and had never been interested in practicing it. I heard people talk about it, about going to courses, but it seemed like something that had nothing to do with me, something for the disoriented, an evasive answer to the world's problems. It seems incredible, but that's how it was. I had visited dozens of temples in China, Japan, Tibet, Korea, Thailand, and Indochina; I had spent days and days in Buddhist monasteries, yet I had never once raised the question of meditation. What is it for? How does one practice it? What is its meaning?

I had accumulated various Buddhas and lived alongside them (a Burmese one, in bronze, presided silently over my library for more than twenty years), but I had done so only because I was drawn to the plastic beauty of the statues. I had never wondered what they were doing there, seated in the lotus position, with that magnanimous smile, eyes half-closed, one hand on the knee and the other touching the ground. Truly, I had never asked myself this, the way someone might never ask about the meaning of that crucified Christ hanging above their bed since the day they were born.

But life is a continuous squandering. How many good people we stumble upon without realizing it, and how many good things pass unnoticed along the path we walk every day, on the way home. Yet we always find the precise occasion: through some kind of chance, someone stops you and makes you pay attention to this or that. The path that had led me to the Pongyang retreat was a genuine labyrinth, but in the end, partly heeding the advice of the fortune-tellers ("Meditate!" many of them had told me) and partly following the white pebbles scattered by Karma Chang Choub, I decided to listen to Leopold. After having spoken to me about his teacher on so many occasions, Leopold told me in November that John Coleman would be coming to Thailand to hold one of his famous courses, and he encouraged me to sign up.

"You have to understand meditation," he said. "Otherwise, what have you been doing all these years in Asia?" The idea of learning to meditate thanks to an American ex-CIA agent struck me as strange, but it is quite true, as Leopold said, that sometimes you need a Western intermediary to begin to understand certain things about the East.

The retreat was in Pongyang, in northern Thailand. It was a series of wooden bungalows with thatched roofs, scattered along the slope of a narrow, intensely green valley among giant bamboo groves, patches of flowers, and small dense woodlands; on the other side of the valley rose the old jungle, with its trees of enormous, foamy crowns. The meditation pavilion was a wooden terrace, set just a short distance from a foaming waterfall. Below, the stream formed a small lake ringed with red and orange flowers.

The day began before sunrise with the sound of a gong that, from the terrace, reverberated gently but firmly through the entire valley, prompting the thirty or so lanterns of the participants to appear very shortly after, floating like fireflies in the darkness as we climbed the hillside. Then each person took their place on a square cushion and meditated for an hour facing a low platform near a small altar holding a Buddha and some flowers, upon which the teacher also meditated. Breakfast followed, then two hours of guided meditation with a fifteen-minute break, lunch (vegetarian) at eleven, two hours of rest, and then another two hours of meditation. At dusk we received a lesson on the Dharma (the path of the Buddha). The gong marked the rhythm of the hours. It sounded for the last time, slow and warm, at nine: the hour for sleep.

It took me twelve hours by train and one by car to reach Pongyang, yet I nearly left the very moment I arrived. By the time I got there, the other participants were already assembled. They were mostly middle-aged women: none beautiful, none beloved, but all intelligent and still curious, which meant none had accepted the mediocre roles society had assigned them, and for that very reason all of them were in the thick of some personal crisis. They were the same type of women I had encountered during my visits to fortune-tellers throughout the year. The Thai women were the wealthiest, while the foreigners had been seasoned by other meditations (some of them, as happens with all converts, were fanatical Buddhists). As for the men, there was not a single interesting one. A Swiss man said he was there because health was his "passion"; another, a Canadian painter, because meditation helped him paint better. And I, what was I doing there? I felt like a patient in a ward who tries to convince himself that he's there by mistake, or that his condition is not as serious as that of his neighbors.

On top of that, the teachers (John Coleman had a Thai assistant and translator) made an unlikely pair. Coleman, a large and heavyset man, youthful and straightforward, had none of the ascetic and saintly air I had expected from a meditator. His assistant (around sixty, lean, rigid and elegant, with his white hair cropped to nothing like a marine) looked exactly like what he was: a police general.

John and the general had met in Bangkok in the early 1950s. And it was precisely this man (then a young captain) who had introduced John (at that time a young American secret agent operating under cover as a businessman) to the path of meditation. Over the years, the captain had built a career: he became aide-de-camp to the king and had recently retired with the reputation of having been one of the most honest police chiefs Thailand had ever had. A devout Buddhist, he had practiced meditation for more than forty years, and now he took it as a genuine duty to teach others.

I overcame my arrogance and decided to stay. The first days were very hard. The lotus position seemed perfectly comfortable the moment I sat down, but after fifteen minutes it became unbearable, and after half an hour it turned into outright torture: my knees felt as though they were filling with pins, my back was a single cramp, and the urge to move was overwhelming. I could not manage to "meditate" for even an instant. Instead of concentrating on the point where the breath touches the skin, my mind became "a monkey jumping from one branch to another," as John had warned us it might, and I was entirely unable to "put a strong rope around a buffalo's neck and tie it to a solid post." "Think only of that point, feel only the sensation of your breath touching the skin. Think only of that point," John would say very slowly, seated on his platform like an enormous wax Buddha. "In the instant the breath touches the surface of the skin, the nerve tissues respond with a sensation, with the experience of touch. Be conscious of that sensation. Be conscious of the breath coming in, going out. And the fires of greed, of hatred, of ignorance, of desire, of aversion will be extinguished, and the mind will grow calm, serene, free of fear and anguish." I had my feet tucked beneath my knees, eyes closed, hands still, but when my attention was not fixed on the pain in my legs or my urge to stand up and shout, my head went off in every direction: it fled and I could not hold it back. I did not control it; it was not mine. Useless. The pain became unbearable, and before John announced the end of the hour (breaking the silence with his particular amen: "May all beings share our merits"), I would give in, shift, change position, open my eyes, and feel frustrated watching the others continue in total serenity.

I came close to leaving on several occasions. What was the point of keeping my eyes closed before such beautiful nature? What was the point of trying to deny myself all thought and artificially imposing pain on myself, when sooner or later life would deliver a dose of it to everyone, myself included?

I listened to the first evening sermons, irritated by their message.

"In life, everything is suffering. One is born causing suffering, one dies suffering. We suffer for what we want, we suffer when we have it for fear of losing it," John would say. It annoyed me to hear him speak of a "higher level of energy" or of "sharpening the lens of concentration." The idea was that after spending the first three days thinking only of that point where the breath touches the skin, the mind would manage to grow calm. Both the exercise (called anapana, a mindfulness-of-breathing technique) and its explanation struck me as intellectually humiliating.

And yet there were pleasures, too. One was the silence. At the opening ceremony, we made a fairly formal commitment to observe the Five Precepts for the duration of the course: not to kill (and this applied to every living creature, mosquitoes included, which is why no insecticides were used in Pongyang), not to lie, not to take what was not given, not to engage in sexual relations ("neither with others nor with oneself"), and not to take intoxicating substances (which meant no coffee and no smoking). We also committed to eating nothing after midday, to wearing no jewelry, to using no perfumes, and to sleeping in no overly comfortable bed. We were also to observe Noble Silence, meaning we would not disturb others with talking or whispering. That I found magnificent.

During the walks between one meditation and the next we would pass the other participants, but there was no need to strike up conversation: a silent nod of the head was enough. At the table there was no need to fill the sometimes unbearable void with banalities even emptier than the void itself. Each person was always alone with themselves.

Silence turned out to be a great discovery because, without the words of others, I realized that the grand beauty of nature lies in its silence. I looked at the stars and felt their silence; the moon made no sound, and the sun rose and set without so much as a murmur. Even the roar of the waterfall, the cries of the birds, the wind blowing through the treetops, all seemed to me part of an extraordinary, animated, cosmic silence that I relished and in which I found peace.

It struck me that silence is a natural right that has been taken from us. I thought with horror of how much of our life is crushed beneath the cacophony we have invented under the illusion that it brings us pleasure or keeps us company. We should all reassert this right to silence from time to time and grant ourselves a pause, a pause of several days of silence in which to listen to ourselves, to reflect, and to recover a little hygiene of the soul.

Another pleasure came from the effort itself. As the days passed, having committed to observing the prohibitions grew in value, and keeping that commitment gave us the sensation of gathering a certain strength. John said the effort served to "create a moral foundation" necessary for reaching the state of meditation. And it was true that, slowly, the act of making an effort made us feel deserving of some reward. "In the final days you will understand. Everything will have its place, everything will make sense," John and the general would repeat, suggesting that by forcing ourselves to concentrate on that point where the breath touches the skin, we would take control of our minds and thereby open ourselves to new horizons.

That was the real reason I was there. Throughout that year spent among fortune-tellers, I had somehow ended up face to face with the word "mind" and found myself fascinated by the possibility of its "powers." It occurred to me that the use of the mind in the West had been progressively narrowed by a series of different reasons, and that in the process a great part of its capacity had been lost. I was interested in discovering that forgotten path, if indeed it had ever truly existed. Could the mind atrophy like any other organ that is not used to its full potential?

I thought of myself. For years I have run a few kilometers every morning, done exercises, tried to work the muscles most useful to me. But when have I tended to my mind? When have I exercised it, pushed it, allowed it to demonstrate how far it is capable of going? The mind is one of the most sophisticated instruments available to us, and yet we do not treat it with the same care we give to the muscles of our legs. We do not teach it to concentrate, we do not train it in the development of certain powers that some have attributed to it in the past.

Alexandra David-Néel, the extraordinary French explorer of the Himalaya during the 1930s, spoke of Tibetan lamas capable of dematerializing through the mind, and of others capable of communicating with each other across great distances. All false? Perhaps not. Perhaps there is something in the human mind that we have lost over time. The hypothesis that somewhere in the world there might still exist human beings capable of using the mind in that way drove some Europeans to travel across Asia in search of them. In 1924, a young Englishman named Paul Brunton traveled through India in search of yogis, hermits, and fakirs, trying to understand how they had managed to attain a kind of "wisdom" through a practice of the mind that, in his view, modernization was making disappear.

The first step on all the different paths toward that "wisdom" was meditation. So it was necessary to understand its meaning.

To be continued.

Sanuk