We were stardust then
Now a dance of consciousness
To stardust again
I have created a little mantra for myself when I fall into that writer trap (not that you have to be a writer to fall into the trap) of narrating something or thinking about how I will relate an experience to others instead of experiencing it fully in the present: "Learn the story before you tell the story" is what I say to myself. It helps sometimes. After the retreat I was ready to begin a blog entry with "It has been an incalculable aeon and many lifetimes since we last spoke..." I wanted to speak about subtle and gross sensations and states of mind, of oneness, plurality and emptiness, of grounds of being and the groundlessness of being...but that too seems like a lifetime ago now. I wrote many pages (including a few Haikus obviously haha) while at the center and there are some ideas I would like to organize and share, maybe while I am in the village of Mirge for the Nepalese winter I will have some time...everything is moving a little too fast for me to focus and go into that kind of detail right now, and it is hard for me to get into a mode where I feel like I can be open on a timed computer surrounded by numerous people for whom privacy and personal space are alien concepts. Suffice it to say that the retreat was revolution and surrender, difficult and worthwhile, painful, cathartic and at times quite joyful. My pagoda cell was prison, sanctuary, tomb, the cave of an ascetic and the infinite space of the clear mind. It rained everyday but two and stormed violently on a few days while I was there, which is odd considering there hadn't been a drop before and other than a five minute sprinkle in Agra, there hasn't been any since. Lightening struck so close once that I thought (before the thunder started) that a big lightbulb had just burst outside my room...and then the grounds of the center rumbled for what seemed like an eternity and it became easy to understand Israelites who thought they had heard the voice of God at Sinai or Greeks who feared the bolts of light and sound from Zeus and Hephestus on Olympus. I realized, while sitting in silence, that I missed some people...and that I was ok with that when I looked closely. This was important for me since in the past I spent much more time repressing and resenting those emotions rather than just observing what was happening in my body and mind and finding an equilibrium. I sent much good will out in all directions, I hope you got it. I have little doubt that I made the right decision to stay in Jaipur, but I was happy to be on the road again as well. I have rotated through travel partners two, three or four at a time since the end of the retreat. I have met and shared boat rides, early morning train cars, late night tuk-tuks (rickshaws), meals, sunrises and sunsets, information and theories with good people from Australia, Austria, Germany, England and Afghanistan in the past week or so...people I would not have met had I just moved on before the Satipatthana course. And the course of my life and theirs is forever changed by our encounter and shared experience...and there will never be a way to know what could or would have happened in a world where we did not cross paths. There can only be gratitude and happiness in what is, not what could have been...that is the domain of suffering. Which brings me to another haiku:
Living in the past
Never gonna be the same
So let it all go
Took a vernacular liberty there...I envoke "poetic license." And now for the report.
Agra: Home of the Taj Mahal
No one would have ever heard of Agra, India if it weren't for the Taj Mahal. The food is second rate and there is little to see or do there besides wander around Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri (an abandoned village an hour outside of town and briefly the capital of the Mughal Empire in the 16th cent), and a bird sanctuary (also a little ways from town). But that doesn't matter. For a moment, while walking beneath the pointed archway at the entrance gate, everyone entered their own private cosmos...the great monument to love, death and aesthetic beauty coming into view on a clear Sunday sunrise. It is truly magnificent. It is the most alive and dynamic structure I have ever seen, in person or otherwise. Its not just the size, shape or meaning, or that there is no precedent for many of the architectural features in the West, or the number of times I've seen it in movies, books or travel magazines, or because its a symbol of finally having made it to India...it was all of that and a lot more. It breathes. No architect that I know of in the west had the guts or the vision to cross the 180 degree mark of a dome to create a sort of rose bud effect guiding the mind to organic movement rather than a static stone existence. Its four sided symmetry is offset by the different grey tones of the marble bricks, and the slight outward tilt of the four minarets gives the impression that the energy of the building is pushing them outward and it all creates graceful tension. Heracleitus came to mind. He spoke of the delicate tension that held the cosmos together, not tension like stress, but the balanced tension of string and wood when they form a bow together. Monet was also there as I watched the light and shadows bring the structure to new life with each and every new angle of the sun's rays. I imagined he had painted a Taj Mahal series, like his Parliament or Rouen Cathedral paintings. Alright, before I write an art history paper...
Varanasi (Benares): The Holiest Place in Hindustan
Varanasi is like bits of all kinds of fantastic (in the absolute value sense of the word, not just the positive) dreams chopped together to make a discombobulated whole, that still somehow doesn't feel whole. It is the holiest city in India for the hundreds of millions of Hindus here. The water of the Ganges is supposed to wash away sins and to have one's body burned on the funeral pyres at the river's shore is an automatic ticket out of samsara, the cycle of rebirth, and therein a ticket out of worldly suffering. I remember sitting with my friend Jesse in Isla Vista, watching the section of "Baraka" where they show the morning puja (devotion act/prayer) on the Ganges and I dreamt of being there and seeing it with my own eyes. It wasnt a "let down" or anything but it is easier to make it look like one smooth act of religious piety with a good editor and a 30" TV screen. To me, Varanasi only seemed holy between the hours of 5 and 7 am, when men stood on the pylons doing yogic sun salutations in arched rhythms and when the pilgrims and sadhus walk down the steep steps of Dasaswambekh Ghat and bathe in and drink the water filled with human waste, garbage, diesel fuel, laundry detergent and the ashes (and sometimes, as we found out on our boat ride when we saw one, intact bodies) of the dead. Our sunrise boatride was an experience I shall not soon forget (Monet was there again as the sun rose blood red through the mist/smog and scattered its light across the water like he painted it in Impression: Sunrise [the piece from which the Impressionist movement took its name] and then rose to orange, yellow and then golden white). Neither was sitting by the charnal grounds late on my first night in the city, the smell of burnt flesh and urine in the air, watching an arrested man, restrained by a police officer say goodbye to his mother's body before they set it ablaze. There have been times where I felt it better to leave out detailed descriptions but it is, in this case, integral to the story of my time in Varanasi. As the title of this entry hints, I felt that there is a void where piety may have once stood in Varanasi...not the great void of not_Self and impermanence which is in truth filled with infinite reality and compassion, but a vast nothing. I am not just speaking about Varanasi (though it was highlighted there since it is said to be the holiest place) it seems that commercialism and monetaryism, blind tradition and ritual, have hollowed out what was once genuine spirituality in what I have seen of the Hindu religion here in India...but such is the case with every religious institution it seems...it was just highlighted for me in Varanasi when every other kid on the ghat tried to sell us hash, or when people would feed you some useless detail about the cremation ceremony and then ask for money next to five burning corpses, or how the cremation ground was organized into India's arcane caste system (that essentially every enlightened teacher in India has spoken out against), or watching how the local people treated their "holy Ganga river." I am aware that I have been in bigger cities and some tourist spots and that maybe its different in other places but its pretty consistent so far. Varanasi one of those places you have to see, but that I can't really recommend if you know what I mean. Visiting the art museum and Siva Temple on the campus of Benares Hindu University was a much more peaceful experience (pictures on facebook) but I will not go into details about that at this point. I have to go move my things, its getting dark and the University library is closing.
I hope everyone had a Thanksgiving filled with gratitude and not too much bickering. I'll be writing more soon. Metta to you all. :).
Breathing in and out
A place to rest awareness
This present moment
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