Vipassana II

         When you wake up the first morning at four a.m., after receiving the first instruction of the course the night before, which is sometimes taught through videos of almost an hour and a half, a monologue by one of the masters who spread this technique in the West , S.N. Goenka, you still can't see where your choice brought to and which wanted consequences it will have.
It's not like the feeling of wanting a horse without knowing how to ride it. It was more like: I'm ready to ride it, but where is the horse.
That feeling wasn't strange.  The teaching had to be developed in levels, which as concentric circles would become wider and wider until allowing the access to the technique and how it would make sense for the life of whom will practice it.

There were three conditions for this to happen.

        Sila, 
are the moral precepts, pillars for the code of conduct. They are the condition, the amniotic fluid where to raise the awareness necessary to acquire the technique.

        Don't kill any living beings. The food they offered was all strictly vegetarian, various soups always accompanied by rice. One day, they made a surprise. Spaghetti and you could see the Japanese eating them with a fork and not the typical chopsticks.

         Don't steal from others. And how could you do it? All your belongings and valuables were taken at beginning of the course.

         Don't have sexual misconduct. The separation between males and females was clear, marked by signs, boundaries drawn on the ground. No walls or guards and everyone respected the border.

         Do not drink any alcohol or use drugs.  Their use would spoil the search for truth by the mind, the truth necessary to absorb the technique.

        Don't lie. Here is the reason for the Noble Silence. If you can't talk, then you can't lie. Very extreme, but very effective.     

       They didn't tell me anything new. Indeed it seemed to me a much easier code; five commandments instead of ten would be pretty easy to respect.

         Samadhi,
The equanimity  of the mind. It is the pillar on which consolidate the technique for a life without pain, the impenetrable wall where any external reality and its representation in us would never penetrate.

         In the first two days there was a loose interpretation on the instructions that were always given the night before. Those were preparatory days. They served to understand only one particular aspect of the technique, which would give access to its general structure.
         Specifically, one had to learn to stay focused, avoiding all thought, on the breathing. Letting the breath, an automatic process of the body that does not require the mind to work, be free without any thoughts of it. Sometimes it happened that the mind wandered and the focus got lost. Don't worry. All we had to do was go back to the breathing and keeping on focusing. And so for eleven hours a day between the big meditation hall and our accommodation we trained on it .
I don't mention the noisy meditation of some of my roommates.

I said 'loose interpretation' because everyone could sit in their own way, for a time of its choice. The important thing was to learn to stay focused.
 
        I didn't understand the purpose of that exercise. In the evening videos, Goenka explained how the technique was not sectarian, that it had a universal and eternal message. It did not need a God to worship with rituals or prayers. There was only man with himself, with his traumas and his suffering. Only by learning to feel truly yourself, your body, and the entire world with them, you could eradicate that evil that made all of us unhappy. Only by achieving the equanimity of the mind we could have understood the source of all our suffering. Then I decided to give it time.

        Paññā,
Wisdom. It's the cement that would break the reality. It is the achievement of absolute, sure, doubtless awareness of the three truths about the world around us and about us, about their false reality.

        Anicca,
        the temporary, the impermanence. 
The world is composed by atoms, atoms that break up and then recompose. Also confirmed by subatomic physics. The things around us are destined to end, to change. All the time. In that case, Goenka gave a fine example.
        On a woman's hair, we find them beautiful, when they are taken well cared for and we compliment the woman and her beauty for that. Then when the same hair is found in our rice plate, then we find them disgusting and ugly. Transformation and destruction of atoms.

        Dukkha,
        Misery or the world as suffering.
        It's true, the world is shit. You suffer, you are stressed, frustrated, for a life that seems to have no meaning, for wishes that we cannot achieve, for a freedom that we cannot express. But all this is the product of our illusion. We believe in things out there. Everything that makes us sad or happy has no consistency, durability, concrete reality. Everything is always passing by. We would not be any longer, as the same everything else. Why then we become attached to them, cling to desires on them? It is us who feed the misery of the world with our illusion that something will be permanent in front of us, and ever more sticking to it because we do not want to let go.
Goenka takes the example of the monk who enters in the river. Once inside it's never the same water that will bathe him. Everything is in constant changing. 
 
        Anattā,
        the non-existence of our self, of our own identity.
Last act of wisdom: since everything starts with us, since we are the ones who get lost in the reality of the world, it is one step further and we discover at same time that we are illusions too, or at least our Self. Our identity is built by the world we are in , by the others who judge us. Actually, it doesn't exist.
Here Goenka sets the example of Buddha. What did he do? For days and days he began to meditate to find a answer to the world's misery. And he got the enlightenment. It all starts with us. As we become aware of that, of the fact that our own Self is nothing that a changing of atoms. From that point of truth he began to teach the meditative technique of Vipassana, the only way to achieve an awareness if not similar, but very close to it.

         And that's how the third day began, and how I, prepared to ride my bike on the flat, started to go uphill.

          From the third day we were instructed that of the eleven hours a day, in only three, morning, afternoon and evening, we were asked to meditate sitting, with closed eyes, with crossed legs, without opening our hands for the whole hour.

What pain, what a suffering. You were getting up from that hour with your legs dumb, with pains in your back, shoulders and neck. Sometimes I wanted to run away, sometimes I wanted to pretend I was there, sometimes I couldn't do it. And yet I was always sitting there trying, understanding, refusing the simplest solution.

        Goenka in the videos predicted what was happening to us, cheering us up, telling us not giving up, to keep on, to seek in the equanimity of the mind the dissolution of all pain. That all the sensations that we felt through our bodies, from positive to painful, were transient, impermanent.
Aniccia repeated Goenka, between one recorded song and another.
Aniccia whispered to us the sensations that passed through every single part of the body accompanied by sweat dripping pain. 

That was the Vipassana technique: the union of mind and body, of awareness and equanimity of mind, of sensation and impermanence.

        Sati
awareness. 
        Without it, no Vipassana meditation would be possible at all. Only with the full possession of an attitude that start from our inner self,  an attitude that accepts our most private sensations for what they are, an attitude of not get involved in the pain or pleasure that they give us, is possible to understand the world for what is, and us with it, the reality as it is.

        That awareness together with the equanimity of the mind worked for me. I noticed that with the days I could feel less and less pain. Becoming aware of the sensations that flowed over all the parts of the body, letting them go, because the nature of the sensations is like of all things, they come and go away. Because in the equanimity of mind nothing stays for ever.
I noticed that as soon as I lost that equanimity and began to worry about a sensation in my leg, foot or shoulder, the pain set itself free again in my thought. And the first thing I had to do was to come back not easily and accept it for what it was, and then let it pass away for what it never was. And I got better.

       The next step of this union, awareness  and equanimity, was to bring out all those sensations, now fixed, locked within us, like our deepest traumas, to dissolve them and let them go. Because the pain was not only given by the posture which everybody of us had chosen to meditate but also by a whole series of obsessions, manias, phobias that had accumulated within us, and which we keep alive because we believe in them as something real that they are not.
Everything passes, everything changes.

        On the last night, Goenka's last video offered a bet. 

He told about a bit of his life: a successful man in his community, but also a miserable and unhappy man. How with the discovering of Vipassana technique he changed his life. The example was not so much about the happy ending kind of example. It was more about focusing on one episode in particular.

After two days of training, he wanted to abandon learning the technique. He didn't see anything useful in it. And then it could clash with his role as a Hindu representative in his community. The fate was that someone advised him to stay, to give the technique a time, which would cost him nothing. And he did, thus he became a better person.

       The idea expressed was:

Even if you do not agree with all the parts of the vipassana theory, even if there are things that are difficult for you to respect for now, such as the silas precepts, do not worry. Try it.

What disadvantage should come from to put in use the vipassana meditation, for a precise period of time, for example a year?  

If it turns out to have been useless, what would you have lost? Just a little bit of time given to meditation. Nothing more. Your life won't be any worse than what it was already.

On the contrary, if after a year the technique starts to work, you will feel better, you will start to accept the world as it is. And its theoretical parts and moral code will begin to make sense to you. You'll find yourself following them without realizing it.

        So should I bet? 

It seems there is nothing to lose.

Vipassana II

            Quando ti svegli la prima mattina alle quattro, dopo aver ricevuto la sera prima il primo messaggio d’istruzione del corso, che a volte è trasmesso con video di quasi un’ora e mezza, un monologo di  uno dei maestri che ha fatto conoscere questa tecnica in occidente, S.N. Goenka, non riesci ancora a incastrare il pensiero della scelta che hai fatto con le sue conseguenze volute liberamente.

            Non è come la sensazione di aver voluto la bicicletta e quindi devi pedalare. Era come: sono pronto a pedale e questa la bicicletta che mi viene data.

            Quella sensazione non era strana.  L’insegnamento si doveva sviluppare a gradi, che come cerchi concentrici si sarebbero allargati fino permettere il possesso della tecnica e del suo senso nella vita di tutti i giorni per chi la praticava.

            C’erano tre condizioni perché ciò succedesse.

            Sila,

            sono i precetti morali che regolano il codice di comportamento. La condizione, il liquido amniotico’ per far crescere la consapevolezza della tecnica.

            - Non uccidere nessun essere vivente. Il cibo offerto era tutto rigorosamente vegetariano, zuppe varie sempre accompagnato da riso. Un giorno, hanno fatto una sorpresa: Spaghetti al sugo. Vedevi i giapponesi mangiarli per la prima volta con la forchetta e non con le bacchette tipiche.

            - Non rubare agli altri. E come fare? Ti venivano ritirati tutti gli averi e oggetti di valore.

            - Non avere una condotta sessuale sregolata. La separazione tra maschi e femmine era netta, segnata da cartelli, confini tracciati a terra. Nessun muro o posti di guardia e tutti rispettavano il confine.

            - Non bere nessuna bevanda alcoolica o fare uso di stupefacenti.  Il loro uso avrebbe contaminato la ricerca della verità da parte della mente, verità necessaria per assorbire la tecnica.

            - Non mentire. È qui la ragione del nobile silenzio. Se non puoi parlare, allora non puoi dire bugie. Molto estremo, ma sicuro efficace.       

            Non mi avevano detto niente di nuovo. Anzi mi sembrava una cosa abbastanza semplice; cinque invece di dieci comandamenti da rispettare.

           

            Samadhi,

            La purezza della mente. Essa è il pilastro su cui consolidare la tecnica per una vita senza dolore, le mura impenetrabili per tutta la realtà esterna nelle sue manifestazioni attraverso di noi.

             

            Nei primi due giorni c’era una certa elasticità nell’interpretare le istruzioni che venivano sempre dettate la sera prima. Erano giorni preparatori. Servivano per comprendere solo un particolare della tecnica, che avrebbe dato accesso al suo aspetto generale. Nello specifico si doveva imparare a rimanere concentrati, evitando ogni pensiero, sulla respirazione. Lasciare che il respiro, un automatismo che non richiede la mente per funzionare, potesse continuare libero senza pensieri. Succedeva a volte che la mente divagava e la concentrazione sul respiro si smarriva. Niente paura. Bisognava solo ritornare all’automatismo del pensiero. E così per undici ore al giorno tra la sala delle meditazioni in comune e la propria stanza.

            Non pongo l’accento sulla meditazione rumorosa di alcuni miei compagni di stanza.

            Ho detto ‘elasticità’ poiché ognuno poteva stare seduto a modo suo, per un tempo arbitrario. L’importante era imparare a rimanere concentrati anche per breve tempo.

             

            Io non capivo la finalità di quell’esercizio. Nei video istruttivi, Goenka spiegava come la tecnica non era settaria, che aveva un messaggio universale ed eterno. Non aveva bisogno di un Dio da venerare con rituali o preghiere. C’era solo l’uomo con se stesso, con i suoi traumi e la sua sofferenza. Solo imparando a sentire veramente se stessi, il proprio corpo, e il mondo con essi, si sarebbe potuto eradicare quel male che ci rendeva infelici. Solo attraverso il raggiungimento della purezza della mente si sarebbe potuto comprendere la fonte di tutti i nostri mali. Allora davo tempo.

            Paññā,

            Saggezza. È il cemento che sfalda la realtà. È il raggiungimento della consapevolezza assoluta, sicura, certa, delle tre verità sul mondo che ci circonda e su di noi, sulla loro falsa consistenza.

            1)Anicca, la temporaneità, il provvisorio. 

            Il mondo è fatto di atomi, atomi che si sfaldano e poi si ricompongono. Confermato anche dalla fisica subatomica. Le cose che ci circondano sono destinate a finire, a mutare. Sempre. In quel caso Goenka fa un bell’esempio, sui capelli di una donna.

            Li troviamo belli, ben curati e così complimentiamo la donna, che li porta, della sua bellezza. Poi quando gli stessi capelli si trovano nel nostro piatto di riso, allora li troviamo disgustosi e brutti. Trasformazione e distruzione degli atomi.

            2)Dukkha, Miseria o il mondo come sofferenza.

            È vero, il mondo è una merda. Si soffre, si è stressati, frustrati per una vita che sembra andare in nessuna direzione, per dei desideri che non possiamo realizzare, per una libertà che non possiamo attuare. Ma tutto ciò è il prodotto di una nostra illusione. Noi crediamo nelle cose lì fuori. Tutto ciò che ci rende tristi o felici non ha nessuna durezza, durata, realtà concreta. Tutto è sempre di passaggio. Noi lo siamo, le cose lo sono. Perché allora affezionarsi a loro, attaccarsi a desideri su di loro? Siamo noi ad alimentare la miseria del mondo con la nostra illusoria certezza che qualcosa permanga davanti a noi, e a volerla.

            Goenka fa l’esempio del monaco che si bagna nel fiume. Una volta dentro non è mai la stessa acqua che lo bagnerà. Tutto è in continua evoluzione. 

  

            3)Anattā, L’inesistenza del proprio sé, della propria identità.

            Ultimo atto della saggezza: visto che tutto parte da noi, visto che noi siamo quelli che ci ‘infanghiamo’ nella realtà del mondo, basta scoprire dentro di noi che anche noi siamo illusione. La nostra identità si costruisce, si fa in confronto al mondo, agli altri. In verità non esiste.

            Qui Goenka fa l’esempio di Buddha. Cosa ha fatto? Per giorni e giorni si è messo a meditare per scoprire il perché della miseria del mondo. E ha avuto l’illuminazione. Tutto parte da noi. Prendendo coscienza di ciò, anche il nostro sé è un illusione come il mondo. Con quella scoperta lui ha iniziato a insegnare la tecnica meditativa del Vipassana, l’unico modo per raggiungere una consapevolezza se non simile, ma molto vicina.

            E fu così che iniziò il terzo giorno, e di come io, preparato a pedalare la bicicletta in pianura, iniziai a pedalare in salita.

            Dal terzo giorno ci fu istruito che delle undici ore al giorno, solo in tre, mattina, pomeriggio e sera, ci si chiedeva di meditare seduti, con gli occhi chiusi, con le gambe incrociate, senza aprire o muovere le mani per l’intera ora. 

            Che dolore, che sofferenza. Ti alzavi da quell’ora con le gambe addormentate, con dolori alla schiena, alle spalle e al collo. A volte volevo scappare, a volte volevo fingere, a volte non ce la facevo. Eppure ero sempre là seduto a provarci, a comprendere, ad annullare la soluzione più semplice.

            Goenka nei video prevedeva quello che ci stava succedendo, incitandoci a non mollare, a continuare, a cercare nella purezza della mente il dissolvimento del dolore. Che tutte le sensazioni che ci attraversavano il corpo, da quelle positive a quelle dolorose erano transitorie.

            Aniccia ripeteva Goenka, tra un canto e un altro registrato.

            Aniccia ci bisbigliavano le sensazioni che attraversavano ogni singolo organo o parte del corpo con il sudore gocciolante dolore. 

            Quella era la tecnica vipassana: l’unione di mente e corpo, di consapevolezza e purezza nel pensiero, di sensazione e transitorietà.

           

            Sati,

            conoscenza consapevole.  Senza di essa nessuna meditazione Vipassana sarebbe possibile. Soltanto con il pieno possesso di un atteggiamento che è diretto dentro di noi, alle nostre sensazioni più personali, ad accettarle per quelle che sono, a non partecipare nel dolore o nel piacere che esse ci consegnano, è possibile comprendere il mondo per quello che è, e noi con esso.

            Tale consapevolezza insieme alla purezza della mente funzionava. Notavo che con i giorni riuscivo a sentire sempre meno dolore. Prendendo coscienza delle sensazioni che scorrevano su tutte le parti del corpo, lasciandole andare, perché la natura delle sensazioni è come quella di tutte le cose, arrivano e vanno via. Perché nella purezza della mente non esiste niente che permane.

            Notavo che appena perdevo quella purezza e iniziavo a preoccuparmi di una sensazione alla gamba, al piede o alla spalla, il dolore galoppava di nuovo libero nel pensiero. E la prima cosa che dovevo fare era ritornare ad accettarlo per quello che era, e poi a lasciarlo passare per quello che non era mai stato. E così andava meglio.

            Il passaggio successivo di quell’accoppiata, conoscenza consapevole e purezza di mente, era far emergere tutte quelle sensazioni, ormai fissate, bloccate dentro di noi, i nostri traumi più profondi per dissolverli e lasciarli andare. Perché il dolore non era solo dato dalla postura con cui si meditava ma anche da tutta una serie di ossessioni, manie, fobie che si erano accumulate dentro di noi, e che noi perpetuiamo poiché le diamo un’esistenza concreta che non hanno.

            Tutto passa, tutto cambia.

            L’ultima sera, l’ultimo video di Goenka proponeva una certa scommessa.

            Raccontava della sua storia, uomo di successo nella sua comunità, ma anche un uomo miserabile e infelice. Di come scoprendo la tecnica vipassana, la sua vita fosse cambiata. L’esempio non era tanto sul lieto fine della storia, tanto su un episodio in particolare.

            Lui, dopo due giorni di corso, voleva abbandonare l’apprendimento. Non ci vedeva niente di utile. E poi si scontrava non poco con il suo ruolo di rappresentante indù della sua comunità. Il caso volle che qualcuno gli consigliò di rimanere, di dare alla tecnica un tempo, che non sarebbe costato niente. E lui lo fece, diventando così una persona migliore.

            L’idea espressa era:

            Anche se tu non sei d’accordo con tutte le parti della teoria della tecnica, anche se ci sono cose che per te difficili da rispettare per il momento, come i precetti di sila, non scoraggiarti. Prova!

            Quale svantaggio dovrebbe provenire dal mettere a frutto la tecnica di meditazione vipassana, per un certo periodo di tempo, per esempio un anno?  

            Se risulta essere stato inutile, cosa si sarebbe perso? Solo un po’ di tempo dato alla meditazione. Niente di più. La tua vita non sarebbe stata peggiore di quello che era già prima.

            Al contrario se dopo un anno la tecnica incomincia a funzionare, tu ti saresti sentito meglio. Saresti stato in grado di accettare il mondo per com’è. E le sue parti teoriche e il suo codice morale avrebbero incominciato ad avere senso e tu si saresti trovato a seguirle senza accorgertene.

           

            Allora scommetto?

            Sembra che non ci sia nulla da perdere

27-29 August, Fukuoka, post-contemporary life.       

     
       The tidy crowd, who knows what to do under the shadow of the lush skyscrapers, who has a moment of calculated hesitation in front of the traffic lights' red, who in the evening under the tireless lighting up sees in a sip different things, that crowd who springs between alarm clock, lunch breaks and any means of transport, shapes a metropolis.

       The polite crowd is the harmony of intentions, the equanimity of meanings, the guarantee of hierarchy, the accounting of holidays, the spending of 'my' will, the freedom grated at the end of the month. That crowd build up a society.

       Of course there are also individuals, but what are they in comparison to the crowd. Although independents into their own words, believers in their identity, subjects in their unique appearance, they are absorbed in the glowing queues, in the race for a acceptable recognition, in the approved judgment of the illegal. In the crowd there are a whole series of games, where tamed dreamers, protesters on probation, original stylists immediately copied, can put on the table what they think they can do best. And it doesn't matter if they win or lose. The crowd needs their play to be strength, to become will.

      So through those thoughts, I could see what was around me. And around me it was Fukuoka.
      And I didn't mind it.
      There was no negative judgment, though it may seem.
      I was crossing a bridge and I stood on a bench with the shape of a shiny, polished boulder. There were four like that. And the yellow melted along the borders and the floor of the bridge matching perfectly with everything.
      On the other side, opposed to mine, the same benches hosted a different occupant. There was a woman playing the 'shamisen', a old three-stringed instrument from China. The woman didn't sing, she sneezed. And as annoying as the voice could be, listening to it together with that instrument, on that bridge, in that city gave me a sense of relaxation and positive mood.

       I had been walking all day, following my own pace, with nowhere to go; taking a corner, crossing a traffic light, stopping on a bench to regain strength, keeping on going again. I had visited shopping malls and found them also beautiful. Discovering important temples that no guide mentioned with the spirit of child dreaming to be an explorer. With open eyes there was the crowd that did not scare me, it did not shrink me, I did not envy. Somehow as much as I had nothing to do with it, I knew I'd end up in the same capsule as the crowd would do occasionally. 
   

      In an English Pub, a small group of Japanese made an appearance: five boys and two girls. For simplicity it would be possible to describe them with seven caricatures: On the male side, the coordinator, the comedian, the loser to make fun of, the silent, the cool guy. On female side: the gaudy and the shy. All the boys were dressed in light black trousers and blue shirts. They were their work clothes. The girls, on the other hand, had prepared themselves very well to go out.
       After choosing two tables near the entrance, they sat in this way; starting from the right side of the gaudy, they were loser, coordinator, silent, cool guy, comedian, shy and gaudy.
       The evening's leaders of the night were, of course, comedian, helped by coordinator, and gaudy. Sometimes cool guy intervened. The other two were little more than extras.
       The night was proceeding with the jokes of comedian and small sipped to the bottles. Shy hadn't really touched hers. Gaudy had to do something to solve it and suggested the game: 'Go, jump, back.'

       The game was simple. The first said 'go', the one on the right could choose between 'go', 'jump' and 'back'.  If he would chose 'go' , the next one always on the right side could have the choice again of the three words. If he would say 'jump', then the choice would have fallen on the second person in succession to the right. 'Back' would have gone to the one on left side.
        The tour started with a series of 'go' and then suddenly someone said 'jump' and to talk was the first on the right and not the second on the same side. The former had to take a sip. The same happened with 'back'. If to speak it would have been the one on the right and not the one on the left, then he had to drink as well. It's no wonder that loser was winning it. In general the group did not care of the winner, they had fun expressed in loudly laughs and rather surprising cries for the polite, respectful, obedient, regulated Japanese.

       And among the various 'go', 'jump' and 'back' it became late. And due the exaggerated and childish noises the crowd of the day was dozing away without totally disappearing. The next day, all seven of them would return to the real 'go' game, a game without 'jump' or unforgivable 'back'. And the price to pay for put asleep the crowds, maybe even just for one day in the week, was to lock themselves in a capsule for the night. A capsule that certainly did not carry you into space, or that in cryogenic mode would not put you to sleep for an awakening in centuries to come, a capsule that looked more like a morgue or cemetery locus. A capsule that I had chosen for accommodation.


        In Japanese society the concept of 'capsule hotels' is widespread, especially in large cities, where daily working immigrants arrive and sometimes cannot leave; too late  to take the appropriate means of transport, too much alcohol to step in the right one. So with their work satchels, their uniformed work dress, and nothing else, they go to these hotels that reflect the needs for a post-contemporary life. together with the encapsulated bed they get a bag containing: a large towel, two small ones, a toothbrush with a disposable toothpaste, disposable slippers, and pajamas.
Every time I appeared, no matter night or day, in the area of mirrors and hairdryers which was then the area of the showers, i saw the same scene: people taking a shower, drying hair, putting pajamas. The pajamas, the only element that separated you from the crowd.
And I slept very well in that locus. There was no noise, no light that could filter. And how could they. The hotel was dug two floors underground.

When I got out of the subway to look for the hotel, all I had to do was to take an escalator and there it was. Even the direct accessibility to a metro station, just all the time and space were been thought, no chance to lose your way.
So on the day of my departure, after I reemerged from the mineral state, since I was under the earth's crust, I went down to the metro and fast, fast I was at the airport.

The metaphor of the living dead who rises from the ground and drags aimlessly beyond life could be easy to make. On the contrary, all those who left the 'capsule hotel' were not living dead of any kind. They weren't dragging anywhere. They knew 'freely' where to go. Everyone was there, where it was supposed to be. Myself included. 

   
     
        Post Scriptum
        Is there hope for change?
Sure.
From those who aren't infected by the crowd. From those masses who want to force their way in and who are pushed back. And with good reason. The crowd fears them. Tremendously. What if everything becomes overcrowded? Cities encompass everything, in a allowed framework, to become megalopolis, but they also say 'basta'. Those masses will rewrite the limit, they will broaden the frame and all of us will be forced to repay our debts to us as well to put them back to one debtor.
Which one?
The choice will be ours when the time comes. Maybe it's ours right now.