John Coleman, Vipassana teacher
Before the coup, we were treated to an excellent conversation with Carl Stimson, who shared the accounts of three Westerners who learned meditation in Asia, before it became mainstream, and long before the Mindfulness Movement. In the excerpt that follows, he discusses his reading of “The Quiet Mind” by John Coleman, a CIA operative who became appointed a teacher by Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and who S.N. Goenka asked to begin leading vipassana courses. Carl picks apart Coleman’s spiritual journey and eventual transformation into a global vipassana teacher.
“These hippies keep showing up at his door, just saying, ‘You’re John Coleman, so teach me vipassana!’”
“Coleman was too young to have fought in World War Two, but he did fight in Korea. Actually, interestingly enough, he had a role in the Japanese war crime trials, which is incredibly fascinating, a major event. And this is kind of a theme for his life.
He was on the ground meeting a lot of important figures. And he was still an undercover CIA agent while in Bangkok. He basically goes through the book as an exploration for ‘the quiet mind.’
He starts off in Thailand, where he has these Thai monk friends, and they start out with hypnosis and ESP. He’s visiting Duke University in the States, doing these kind of wacky card tricks where people are trying to guess the shapes on the other side, kind of like that scene in Ghostbusters and, and it's just kind of like, wow, hypnosis, here we go! We're talking about mind control of things like that. It's associated with Buddhism, even though it's not really very Buddhist, and eventually he gets into more Buddhism. He goes to a course in Thailand and is supposed to be there for almost two weeks, but he is only there for a few nights and it's just too intense! He doesn't explain why, but he leaves quite early. I think next year or not too long after that, he goes to Burma and sits in a course at IMC with U Ba Khin, who is still alive. It's probably the late 1950s.
Then he spends the next portion of the book exploring spirituality in India. He goes to northern India and meets Tibetan Buddhists and talks about Tantra. In line with the rest of the crazy experiences, he meets some pretty amazing figures! One of them is Krishnamutri, who isn't really a Buddhist or a Hindu figure, but definitely within the Eastern realm of spiritual teachers. Coleman has this wild chance meeting on a plane, where he basically just sees this interesting-looking Indian guy and ends up switching seats to talk with him.
When he goes to North India, he also ends up meeting Tenzing, the Sherpa who was the first person to scale Mount Everest with Mr. Edmund Hillary. So it's just like, wow, all these amazing figures that he's just kind of running into, U Ba Khin being among them.
He spent some time in Japan where he meets more great teachers, like D.T. Suzuki and he visited a Zen monastery. Towards the end of the book, he goes back to England, as he had married a British woman. And he encounters the Maharishi, and tries a little bit of transcendental meditation.
So by now we're in a in the late 1960s, and he's talking about the Beatles and that whole craze. He does a little bit of experimentation, he also goes to a couple Quaker meetings, as well as a couple spiritualist meetings, which is defunct now. They were really into sciences and speaking with the spirits of the dead. He also visits a Benedictine monastery and has some conversations with those people.
At the end of the book, he summarizes everything and says, ‘Hey, I looked into all these things. But the one that really stuck with me was the Vipassana that was taught in Burma.’ So he goes back there, takes his wife, and they spend some time at the meditation center. It's not quite clear if his wife is meditating or not, but he's meditating and hanging out there.
He ends the book by going back to England and his wife has a child. He leaves the CIA and decides not to pursue that line of work. He gets a job in a factory somewhere in England.
But he gets a letter from U Ba Khin which is quite detailed. It says, ‘I want you to start teaching. You need to meditate at this certain time of day. I'm going to be meditating, sending out my metta and my meditation vibrations to my teachers all over the world. You need to be meditating at that time so you can sync up with me.’
It's quite a detailed instruction about this, but he doesn't really do anything.
Then he ends up writing a postscript a number of years later, and his wife is pregnant again. By now, Goenka is teaching in India, and he's starting to teach a lot of Western hippies who are coming to his courses. And they're saying, ‘Hey, I love this! This was awesome. I want to continue when I go back to to Europe or to America, and how can I do that?’
Well, U Ba Khin had appointed various teachers. So Goenka said, ‘Well, there's this guy in England, he's an American, and his name's John Coleman.’ So all these hippies start showing up at his door in this working class community. He's not living in a hippie community by any means! But these hippies keep showing up at his door, just saying, ‘You're John Coleman, so teach me vipassana!’
He's turning them away, saying, ‘No, I don't do that. I've got a family and a job!’ But they just keep showing up until he finally says, ‘Okay, I'll teach you a course.’ And the course they end up organizing happens right after his wife gives birth to his second child, it was premature. So he leaves like the day after that child is born. His wife says, ‘You’ve got to go teach this course because if you don't, these hippies are never going stop showing up at our door!’
It’s not really clear if Coleman’s been meditating seriously in the intervening years. He expresses a little bit of anxiety about teaching, so I don't think he's ever taught before. I'm not totally sure if he was an official Goenka teacher, or if he was kind of an unofficial Goenka teacher, or if he's teaching these courses that were organized more kind of ad hoc. But apparently the course goes pretty well and, and he ends up teaching, starting out pretty long career of teaching, stretching over several decades, all over the world and he becomes a pretty prominent teacher.”