Entry 105 Arriving in Bangkok in the early morning on New Year’s Day treated me to the unexpected, almost surreal: cool fresh air and empty streets. I have never seen the sky so clear here before, blue with golden rays of sunshine. The bus goes unimpeded. Holy holiday, everyone else’s hangover is my miracle morning. India shed a few tears in the form of a sparse rain as I rode to the train station sitting on my old black rolly bag on top of a flatbed bicycle rickshaw. I held my backpack between my knees to cover my shoes and my rain jacket over me like a little tent as we took a back lane route that avoided the motor traffic but couldn’t avoid the tall speed bumps every ten or twenty meters that popped me up in the air for moment and made the driver have to brake and pedal hard over and over. He handled it with typical Indian patience for life’s imperfections, so I did the same. I had ended up in a little town called Kakdwip that is so unlikely to be visited by a foreigner that everyone’s first line was “excuse me, what is your purpose here.” It seems my purpose was to find a relatively quiet and clean place to do some important internal preparations. It seems I had to do them in dreams while staying in bed a few days with a high fever. Could this be the famed union of illusory body and clear light? Something in me is forever transformed. It felt like making an amulet or a mini teddybear sized body out of light that was neither bright nor dim but strong and a little blueish. Over and over and over again. And again. Days of hours of thousands dream moments of it. I had no choice, it happened without my willing it. Every time I passed out it was this same thing. Except when it was one other thing, which was more like separating the mind from the body image and inverting it. Like inverting a plastic bag, it ends up the same shape as before, but with the mind-body it is more like the bag is as thick walled as it is big, so that when it rolls over itself to invert the inside surface and the outside surface run along each other with a curious sense of viscosity that comes from their boundaries intermingling. Is this how we shed a body? I had the refuge of my sturdy little MSR Hubba 1 tent, without rainfly, in a bed next to a screenless window facing thankfully little and a view of the sun and moon. The first night there, before I was feverish again and while C was still there, we took pictures of each other wearing the wooden Rahu mask she happened to be carrying in her shoulder bag. I told her how I had a big fierce image of him stuck to this computer for a year or so. That night I saw the entire pantheon of gods, in a hierarchy of wide echelons. That was the same dream for a long time also. Somehow I was going through some operation to survey and sum them all, over and over. Similar to a mathematical proof that concludes with 1=1, no matter what direction they were approached from, they balanced and summed to One. I woke up and said to C, “It all adds up to Krishna.” How did I even get out there? Well, I was in very cold Delhi, where most everyone had a cold and the fashion seemed to be uncovered coughs. I went there to see the Karmapa. He was actually pale from being sick, like the makeup they put on people in movies to show they are so sick they could die, but he showed up to give the teachings on Christmas Day. He is very sweet, with abundant concern for others. By the way, there is a pretender Karmapa also, that many consider the “official” one. I saw that dude in Bodhgaya. He hunched, snorted between sentences, and gave off the vibe of self-importance. We live in a sad world where politics and power has corrupted so much of our spiritual heritages, and this has happened here too. I had intended to do a nine day retreat in Delhi, but I was sick, my two roommates were sick, Karmapa was sick, and pretty much the whole 25 million person city seems to be sick. That would be OK if I found the practice helpful, but I already had plenty of listening to prayers in Tibetan while in Bodhgaya. So I took C’s offer to accompany her to the pilgrimage island of Gangasagar – where the Ganges meets to Bay of Bengal. My first fever finally broke in a drenching night sweat sometime in the night after I met the Karmapa, and I managed to get out and make travel arrangements. I met her in Kolkata for a bus ride down to the coast, a ferry ride to the island, and then another bus ride to the south end of the island. You know Indian buses, right? Public transit is decidedly not underutilized in India. So it is after dark when the bus comes to the end of the line. The two of us end up on on of these bicycle flatbeds getting the Hindu welcome at every place we enquire (“not Hindu, not welcome.”) Somehow C had thought that there were lots of hotels, but there were only ashrams with people waving their palms at us like wiping us off imaginary glass. Since I had been so weak in the first place, my strategy the whole journey had been complete inner peace – no internal tension. If we had to sleep rough or bus out so be it. But I did in fact ask for a favor. Not begging. No desperation. And at that moment C decides to argue for the free and wholesome use of the F-word. Somehow I convince her to let that one go just long enough to see if our nighttime bicycle sojourn can result in accommodation. I have certainly been a vocal and frequent user of that term for most of my life, but as I point out to her, there are a whole range of small, gentle, helpful friends who get easily driven off by any sort of violent energy. So when you are really needing a little helping hand, make a space for the little helping hands by calming the space of the heart, using gentle tones and language, moving gracefully. It seems hopeless, but we stick to her strategy: don’t get off the bike. At the one and only tourist lodge, run by a government organization, one heroic Captain Sanjay comes to our rescue. The lodge had refused us, but he gets an extra room for us under his name, after verifying my story with passport, ticket stubs, and a quick search of the luggage. He stares at my passport in disbelief for the longest time. “1967? 1967? How is this possible, 1967? I thought you looked 23.” Cpt. Sanjay was there with a detail to set up camp on the beach the next day to stay for the upcoming gathering. In two weeks some untold millions are expected to come and have a wash and many preparations were underway. You don’t meet really decent, good-hearted people like that so often. With his help we got a clean room and even happened to get a delicious meal of Aloo Ghobi (potato-cauliflower) and Chapatti (maybe the best I have ever had.) It just so happens this was the meal I had been talking about wanting when we got in the F-word discussion. The only downside is that the lodge manager figures out he can pretend that Sanjay hadn’t paid for the room when he had, but lying is business as usual in the northern part of India. (That’s better than what happens to me while I am sick, when the sweetest guy by daytime gets drunk at night, gets in my room, sits on the bed with interesting ideas about math so that two nights should be charged for three days, giving me looks of questionable intention. It helps to not get mad.) In the morning we walk to the sea, have some food, visit the temple, and I get one more very firm Cpt. Sanjay handshake. Like every other time he looks at me with such wonder. I am not sure why. Maybe when I match his strong grip with my pencil-like arm. Afterwards we are back on the mainland in the middle of nowhere, the nearest little town Kakdwip. India is something very special, and sometime in life you might consider bearing the many difficulties and visiting if you haven’t. There is something special to be felt in the hearts of the people. When you are in need, people will come to your help. That said, it is well worth noting that if anyone came to my beautiful home state and started treating it the way they treat their home.... Well, it would be hard to remain non-violent if anyone mistreated nature that way where I come from, starting with their incessant spitting on every public surface near and far and finishing with the absolute ecological disaster of their cities that look every single bit like Hell. A few words on the rest of my India travels: I had a good stay in Bodhgaya. The big temple there has a very special presence and it is easy to experience the meditative stability that is the foundation of enlightenment. An excellent time to go is during the annual international chanting festival in December. The maze-like walkways of the old city in Varanasi seem to sum up the India you think of when you think of India. There are some of those old-world sized people there like you see, for example, in Italy. They have amazing faces, such stronger energy than us modern day cream puffs. If you happen to go, then the chocolate banana (olive oil) dosa at the Dosa Cafe near Mir Ghat is excellent. Do you know what the crease on clothes means? It means that your clothes are clean because back in the day, or in Varanasi, the water is too dirty to really clean the clothes during washing, so they are disinfected by ironing. Still done there today with irons filled with coals. Yes, they burn human carcasses by the river. When you see it in pictures it is a huge pile of logs. What I saw were more like campfires. Burning humans sound and smell like other forms of roasting meat. It is all ugly. Burning people outdoors with crowds of creepily fixated men packed together in tight clusters staring unbrokenly isn’t anything that makes me particularly proud to live on this planet. I was walking along the ghats and passed within about 1 meter of one of these “protein” logs sizzling away. Later I was sitting at dinner contemplating non-differentiation (as the gate to enlightenment) as the smell of rotten barbecue wafted from my clothes. In a more cheery moment, I went on a temple walking tour with a group from the hostel. I got myself a Tulsi garland because, well if you are walking around temples in Varanasi in all white clothes, it seems to follow. Then we got a VIP boat ride to go see an artist painting by the river. I had happened to get oranges so had something to share with the group of businessmen and we all took pictures of each other up on the roof of the boat. Arriving at the artist, I opened B’s I-Ching to Chen Tui – Lake in Heaven. It seemed to relate well to my meditative experience in Bodhgaya, and also that of Y from Luxembourg (who happened to be staying at the Root Institute the whole time I was there though we never met or talked.) The artist wanted us to read the poem to him too, so we did, one stanza each with a little help from one of the locals. Then he painted B from Canada a very cool Shiva in his journal, which he carefully carried around open a long time watching the paint dry. In conclusion: They made flower mandalas on the floor in the Kolkata airport, so let me use that image to share my best wishes for a healthy, uplifting, transformative New Year.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:38:53 +0000
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