Korridorium

♫ Anāt­man ♫

193/398

II enter the cor­ri­dor with slumped shoul­ders. It’s dread­ful to have dis­ap­pointed the mas­ter. He put such effort into me, try­ing again and again to dis­ci­pline my mind and make it clear to me that every­thing I expe­ri­ence is mere illu­sion, a mirage, the froth of all things.

Yet I sim­ply can­not get rid of the illu­sion that I, I myself, the focus of this expe­ri­ence, am real. That I really exist. I do think, I feel, I have expe­ri­ences! How could I not exist and be mere imag­i­na­tion then?

What has the mas­ter not already tried with me?

From

• logic (there is no con­scious­ness in the plural),
• phi­los­o­phy (Atman and Brah­man are one),
• para­dox (the kōan of the one hand clap­ping),
• dream yoga (the mas­ter’s vis­its in my dreams to show me that I too am just a dream, dream­ing itself),
• sci­ence (Susan Black­more’s Grand Illu­sion videos),
• mys­ti­cism (“In You, this honey is dis­solved, O milk of life, so mild, so fine!”)

to

• med­i­ta­tive dis­ci­pline (sit­ting for days in a state of non-think­ing),
• sur­re­al­ism (Jim Hen­son’s The Cube: straw­berry jam) and even
• vio­lence (unex­pected punches to the face, which are said to have brought some adepts enlight­en­ment)

and on to

• a “snooze but­ton” for my thoughts (which he sought to anchor in me through NLP),
• per­sis­tent ignor­ing (not only of my ques­tions, but also of my increas­ing hunger),
• exten­sive man­dala con­tem­pla­tion (M.C. Escher tes­sel­la­tions with the ques­tion “Where is the cen­ter?”), and even
• Bud­dhist dark ther­apy.

Yet my sup­pos­edly illu­sory self remained unim­pressed by all this. Not my idea of being an indi­vid­ual crum­bled under this onslaught, but my idea that there was some­thing like a solid world around me.

Finally, my mas­ter gave up his efforts. I had already seen it com­ing that he would even­tu­ally send me to the leg­endary place of which his stu­dents only speak in hushed tones: the cor­ri­dor of the fail­ures, the cor­ri­dor of the solip­sists. It is said that no one ever returned from this pas­sage which the water of the small river had eaten into the belly of the moun­tain, where it then dis­ap­pears with­out a trace.

I too will dis­ap­pear with­out a trace. For a few days, maybe weeks, my fel­low pupils will still speak my name, in hushed tones, as a cau­tion­ary tale of some­one stub­born, unteach­able, some­one cling­ing to the great illu­sion and sim­ply unable to let go. But soon, soon I will be for­got­ten and gone.

The descent into dark­ness is dif­fi­cult. I am already com­pletely soaked; the cold seeps into my core. My whole body trem­bles, also because mor­tal dread grips me. That the self can­not die because it does not even exist can­not com­fort me, not even now. I hear des­per­ate wail­ing, and after some time I real­ize it is com­ing from my own mouth. I fall silent.

From the sound of the water I can tell that I am enter­ing a large cave. I think I per­ceive a glim­mer of light high above me. Is that a stair­case carved into the rock face? It leads up, towards the glim­mer. I sit down in lotus posi­tion on the bare rock and close my eyes. Maybe the years of train­ing have some­how paid off after all.

It won’t be me climb­ing those steps and ascend­ing. Not me.

♫ Dream Ques­tions Med­ley Eo ipso ♫

195/398

I enter the Kor­ri­do­rium dou­ble-decker bus for the fourth time now. Its round trip through the Ger­man coun­try­side leads to my small town once a month, and part of the ser­vice is that you reg­is­ter online or by phone, get picked up from home late in the evening, and get dropped off there again the next morn­ing.

It’s sim­i­lar to the shut­tle buses for club nights in Berlin, except that here, the bus itself is the club. Every month the ques­tion you embark with on your nightly jour­ney changes—and, of course, so does the route, con­tin­u­ously pick­ing up dif­fer­ent pas­sen­gers along the way. Once all trav­el­ers are on board, the bus parks some­where out­side of town—at least that’s my impres­sion from the first three trips. You can crack the win­dows open a bit to let in fresh air, but they are opaque, so I can only go by sound.

The first time, it could have been a high­way over­pass: dri­ving noises from cars and trucks kept blend­ing into the soft ambi­ent sounds. The sec­ond time, I think I heard a river, although I don’t actu­ally know of any­thing around here that bab­bles so cheer­fully. That was the trip with the ques­tion, “What is dream (and where to, once I awake)?” I can’t remem­ber read­ing it on the Kor­ri­do­rium blog, but the­mat­i­cally, it fits, of course.

On the third trip, I dis­cov­ered that you can lounge on cush­ions in the back of the bus. That’s where the DJ sits all night long, illu­mi­nated only by the pale light of his lap­top and the blink­ing LEDs of his gear. That’s also where the woman with the ther­mos sits down occasionally—the one who walks around the bus ask­ing us trav­el­ers the ques­tion of the night and refill­ing our tea.

The music, the con­verted, almost com­pletely dark­ened bus, and the ques­tion whis­pered over the loud­speak­ers again and again cre­ate a very pecu­liar and spe­cial atmos­phere. I’ve tried telling friends about it. One lis­tened, shak­ing his head, and at some point sum­ma­rized: “So, a self-dis­cov­ery trip!” I didn’t want to con­firm or deny that. After all, I’m float­ing almost all night in the inter­me­di­ate realm between sleep, dream, and intense thoughts. “But did you answer the ques­tions?” he asked. Did I? Hard to say. The third one was “Where does con­scious­ness take place (and what do I get out of it)?” and yes, some­how I found an answer. It was com­pletely silent around the bus until a rich cho­rus of bird­song started up in the morn­ing. Appar­ently, on the third trip, it was parked next to a patch of woods. And that’s when an answer came to me. Not really to this ques­tion, and I can’t really put the answer into words either—but an insight came to me that made a night of barely sleep­ing more than worth­while.

Are there drugs? Sex? Is it a cult? My friends find the “mobile music med­i­ta­tion” sus­pi­cious, and they’re look­ing for the catch. Ulti­mately, what tips the scale is that none of them is will­ing to forgo their pre­cious sleep.

So, I embarked on the nightly jour­ney alone again. I nes­tle into my berth, enveloped by soft har­monies into which a voice whis­pers: “Where does sound lead (and into what res­o­nance, silence)?” Strange ques­tions, these, that let the Kor­ri­do­rium bus glide through the night. In my half-sleep, they take on a wild life of their own and pro­vide me with valu­able insights—just as, at night, things go on in my head that I pre­vi­ously had no inkling of.