Like Leonard Cohen in a Buddhist colony, there is method to the madness of depriving ourselves

Leonard Cohen went to the Mount Baldy Buddhist colony in the snow-covered hills of California, and stayed there for five years.

Wondering why he would do that, lead me to ask why anyone enforces strictness upon themselves. Some even join orders that take them away from their family and friends forever. I haven’t got a lot of experience with this kind of thing, but I have got some, and so have most of us.

It’s hard to deprive ourselves, it’s hard to even see what the point is. Most of us know what it’s like. In the religious world, many of us have experienced deprivation on particular occasions. No meat on Fridays, or fasting before communion, or Lent, those are old ones, long forgotten.

One bloke I know, is passionate about his drinking regimen, goes to the same pub at the same time, every night in the week. For 11 months of the year he keeps it up, day in, day out, stubbornly refusing to change it for God or man. Even when I came home at Christmas from New York, he wouldn’t change the timing of his visit to the pub. The time was 10.45 every night, if I wanted to meet him, that was the time. You can imagine that his body must crave those four pints every night, you can imagine that it would be very hard for him to stop. Yet he does. Every Lent without fail he refuses to touch a drop of alcohol, still goes to the pub at the same time, but sticks to Ballygowen. I know he’s not religious, so that’s not his reasoning, I think it’s the desire that lies deep inside us all, to experience deprivation, because we know that doing it, squeezes the dirt from us, and replaces it with clean.

One Guru described meditation as silencing your mind, and creating a cavity, where other thoughts can come in, allowing you to have room for others, more room for their words. Meditation is in fact a type of deprivation, we deprive our mind of thought. The mind likes to ruminate and sometimes we want it to, maybe to solve a problem or just tell you which direction to walk. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop so easily, it keeps going on, long after you’ve gotten there. It thinks about yesterdays and berates or praises itself, it can be exhausting.

That’s why Leonard Cohen went to the mountains of California, he wanted to get hold of his mind. Obviously he had a great mind, one that could create wonderful poetry and song. But it didn’t stop there; it went on and on as far as it could go, not stopping even when he wanted to sleep. Sleep deprivation leads to depression, and a great mind like Leonard’s could thrive on self-flagellation if it got out of control.

So Leonard went to a Buddhist Colony where he was deprived of his fame and fortune, where they awakened at 3.00am to meditate, and someone watched over them with a small stick, awakening them if they drifted to sleep, where he scrubbed floors and toilets and did whatever mindless task that was required.

Thousands of years ago, life was simple; a human woke up with only one main task, find food, and try not be killed by a predator, the mind didn’t have anything else to do. Now most of us are trying to eat less food, while our minds are working overtime on distractions. We are filled with admiration for the disciplined who control their minds and deprive themselves of what we used to kill for.