The story of the departure ceremony (5): ‘De Kweeste’.

The Departure Ceremony/Pilgrim Lauds of the Walk of Wisdom on December 5 in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen was unfortunately cancelled due to corona. Thus, the contribution of pilgrim Jeroen van Zuylen, the text of Henk Barendregt, professor of mathematics and meditation teacher, not recited, but voiced.
The text for each Departure Ceremony comes from the book ‘Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims’.
Below you will find the text as recorded by Jeroen.
The Kweeste
Beginning. When I was four, I regularly danced to ballet music that was easy to hear. Later we got a recording of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. “I don’t like that,” I said to my father. He encouraged me: “Listen to it more often, and that will change”. I obediently did so and indeed the Sacre became fascinating.
At a school concert, when I was nine at the time, the Concertgebouw Orchestra played Daphnis et Chloé by Ravel and the Sacre. Both works were smashing. But at the Sacre, there was more going on. During Cortège du Sage , fourteen different rhythms play together, a sensory overdose. My consciousness ‘fell apart’; You saw the orchestra and heard the music, but as unreal. Most often, such dissociative phenomena cause anxiety. However, that didn’t happen, because the music was familiar.
Not long after, while reading a book about the great universe, I wondered, “What would it be like there, so far away? Could there be creatures there too? Maybe we are the only ones in the immense universe.” In this way, you enter an area beyond language. Then suddenly it’s there: a short-lived experience, ‘infinitely’ strong. It feels like the most important event in your life, on the border of being and non-being. It was sublime and terrifying at the same time, coming back every few years. I called it ‘experience’ A‘.
Looking. You couldn’t conjure up experience A . I asked my mathematics teacher Fred Fischer at the Montessori Lyceum what A could mean. In response, Fischer lent me the book What is existentialism? by the philosopher Delfgauw. This referred to Buddhist writers such as Daisetz Suzuki. That fitted in well with lessons from our Dutch teacher Rein Bloem. He showed us a piece of chalk and asked, “What is this?” We felt that the conventional answer did not apply. Flower insisted. Finally, someone said timidly: “A piece of chalk”. Bloem then smashed it to smithereens against the wall. “And what is it now!?” he exclaimed.
“This is so strange, it must mean something,” I thought. It motivated me to study Zen. Suzuki said: “The existentialists also know the experience of nothingness, but their ego prevents them from jumping into it.” Exciting, but I didn’t really understand it.
The road. Later, as a postdoc in California, the practice came. There I met the Japanese Zen teacher Kobun Chino. Every week I visited his theory classes and later also morning meditation (05:30!). That was fascinating. Although I hoped A would come back, that didn’t happen. But meditation became commonplace.
Repetition. Back in the Netherlands, I regularly traveled to California to meditate and work at the Tassajara Mountain Center. At 04:40 you were awakened by a wooden soundboard echoing through the valley. While meditating, experience A came once, unexpectedly.
I also started looking for meditation options in the Netherlands. Found a vipassana teacher, the Thai monk Phra Mettavihari. He taught mindfulness and insight meditation. We learned to recognize unwholesome consciousness, such as hatred and desire; how we could build concentration.
The latter happened on 10-day intensive vipassana retreats. You practiced the attention on breath movement. Then you focus it on predominant states of consciousness, observing the phenomena at an appropriate distance. A sublime consciousness emerged, comparable to A without fear. You thought you had achieved something, but the teacher was adamant: “Just as you renounce hatred and desire, by being mindful, we now also distance ourselves from sublime experiences.”
By practicing that obediently, normal consciousness fell apart. This time―without music―it was horrible: all grip was lost. Mettavihari indicated how to proceed: “Meditate quietly; Eventually, everything will fall into place.” Indeed, after 36 hours of hard work, the existential primal fear was considerably reduced.
Insight. After the retreat, a certain suspicion of vipassana remained. During the next retreat, everything really fell into place. By looking directly at the existential fear, it turned out that it was caused by a self-made image to which we cling. That insight transformed
the menacing tiger of fear to a sweet. This is how you tame the mother of existential fears: not being. It gives direction to your life: working out and passing on the method to tame the primal fear.
Hopefully we will be able to hold Departure Ceremonies again soon. Keep an eye on the agenda .