Sean's Blog: "Spiritual Communities"

Web link!

2007-03-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

I just deleted "Sean, The Blog" if you're checking this webspace and looking for my latest, you can visit my homepage (hey I have one now, finally!) www.livemoore.com
Much love!

Spiritual Communities Portfolio

2006-07-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Oi!
After many hours of work, the portfolio was put together about a month ago...
The hard copy is beautiful, with lots of magazine and newspaper articles about the Silver Jubilee and print outs of all the photos from the web pages... come to think of it, it was a little expensive.... :)
Any how, a few people have asked about the final paper, and so (if I am successful with the html--) following is a print out of the Table of Contents from the portfolio, the major essays should be clickable links to PDF files of sections of the portfolio itself...
(Hint: Right click and choose "Save Target As..." should open up a window for you to save the PDF files on your computer so you can view them offline or print them easily.... AND if you can't view the files, go to www.adobe.com and download the latest version of Acrobat Reader, which is completely free...)
Anyway, here is the online portfolio!

Table of Contents

Sean Moore

NCLC 495

Spiritual Communities

Glossary

Introduction – Spiritual Communities, Backwards

Competencies – Effective Citizenship: Studying Indian Spirituality

Competencies – Valuing: Anger and Artha

Competencies – Global Understanding: The Art of Living Foundation

Competencies – Global Understanding: India and the World Economy

Living In India – Introduction to the Journals and Web Log

Early Journals & Essays (Hard-copy only!)

Web Log & Photogtaphs of India
(Since you're on the blog, just use the list of months
in the 'Archive' on the right hand side of the page!)

Conclusion – Home, the Heart, and Where It All Is

Annotated Bibliography

Things Found—Appendix (Hard-copy only!)

Dismissing Theology?

2006-05-15T03:04:00.000-07:00

After my noon time meal and checking my e-mail yesterday, just as I was about to retreat to my journal and reflect on my seemingly deep seated feelings that Hinduism isn’t as practical or parsimonious in its cosmological intricacies as the Buddhist or Christian religions, or simply a yoga practice divorced of religious dogmas, I joined a wild (solo) adventure making the question of dismissal (of Hinduism) blissfully more complex...
One thing I hoped to survey on my trip to India was how individuals blend in or stand out from group activities and “groupthink” in spiritual communities, and whether heterodoxy (I just started reading Sen’s Argumentative Indian: under normal circumstances, I would never think to use the word “Heterodoxy” :) ) has more of an effect of creating factions within the group or leading the group as a whole in new directions. This is an important element in forecasting the direction Spiritual Communities take, of course, but this is also dear to my heart and very relative to my personal experience (which is, I guess, more what the blog is about :) )
When I first became involved with the Art of Living community, I was strongly identified as a Buddhist. My first meditation teacher was a Theravada Buddhist monk, and though, at that time, I went to a diverse number of different spiritual groups locally for meditation and studies, they were almost exclusively Buddhist groups. In Buddhism, many schools of thought say that praying to gods (or “Gods” or “God”) is futile, because essentially, one must rely on ones own inner intelligence and wisdom, only that will be one’s saving grace. A Buddhist does not take refuge in different gods because when those gods come out of power, Buddhists fear, the devotee is “stuck on a sinking ship”, to quote an old Buddhist teacher of mine.
I had somewhat of a cosmological butting of heads when the first week after learning the basic Art of Living techniques, I found it was common practice to close with group singing, and in the largely Hindu community that I learned the Art of Living with, this took the shape of Sanskrit mantras and Hindi bhajans. Was I “breaking refuge”? Would these Gods interfere with the direct path of my Buddhist studies? Who in the world is Vasudevaya?
Gradually, and I attribute it largely to both a hankering to learn the practice of mantra, whether Hindu or Buddhist, combined with the heart-wrenchingly beautiful singing each week of my dear friend Bhaskar, I began to take some pleasure in the musical Satsangs. Over time I became more involved with Art of Living and felt that it embodied the Buddhist teachings as I understood them, and I began to feel it was the most positive place for me to place my energies. Yet, over the years (though, admittedly, it has only been four…) being involved with the predominantly Hindu community of Art of Living in different areas, there has been a shift, completely of my own will, from Art of Living as a tool for embodying Buddhist ideals to Art of Living as a sort of dock on the Ocean of world religions, of which, the Sea of Hinduism is most readily at hand. (Can you tell I’m writing from the beach?)
The Vedic Sciences and the philosophies of the Upanishads and Vedanta that are so intertwined with the ‘formless’ Hindu religion have much to inform and supplement Buddhism, much as the simplicity of some Buddhist cosmology (Hinayana/earlier Buddhism) and meditative practices (Zen-mindfulness or Vipasana) give focus to the infamously diffuse light of Hinduism. Hinduism is, for me, about detail and fullness, and Buddhism is about direction.
So, for long I have been learning about Vedic Sciences and focusing mainly on scriptures of Vedanta or knowledge directly from Sri Sri, yet, all the while I have had, just under the surface, my deep well of love for Buddhism and Christianity. As time passes in the Art of Living, I try to judge for myself whatever I see. Sometimes in peoples’ behavior or attitudes or (not to blaspheme against some Art of Living teachers, but in my perception I must include this) their teachings, there is some sense that individuals bring in some amount of (Hindu) religious dogma into the more simplistic (parsimonious) spiritual teachings of the Guru. I am not talking about this now for any personal derision or as a more essential call back to the origin of the teachings, but rather about my own experience, so I am not including any further examples of this. However, I do sense at times this dogmatism and so I try to understand the religious practice, I try to see if it works for me and, if so, to what extent and why it does work for me. However, it has been easy for me to get wrapped up in groupthink or private practices of a spiritual group, and over the past few years, I’ve had ample opportunities to check myself in my attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
“Where I am” lately seems to be trying to come to terms (as anyone who has suffered through the rougher parts of reading the blog knows…) with being a “Yogi” and being American, with being in a predominantly Hindu community much of the time, and being somewhat othered by not being Hindu and also by not being Indian. * These questions occur time and again for me—either I tend to neuroses or I am, more positively, a self-aware person (in a fun comment in one of my personal journals, I wrote this same line and followed it with the pondering: “Is there a difference between neurosis and self-awareness?”) or maybe it’s just my age.
This sort of personal search for identity is given some immediacy by my history of what I could call, if I wanted to be cruel to myself, my religious fervor. This immediacy is augmented by frustrations with small-mindedness of people and group “politics” that are inevitable in any organization, spiritual or otherwise, Indian or American or International. (Though a famous quote that I can’t place, I believe it is Tagore, comes to mind: “If there are three Indians, there will be three opinions.” Of course, I’m saying this with love.) Over the past year, I’ve asked myself again and again, “Am I a Hindu?” And the only answer I will allow myself to proffer is, “NO!” (And yes, I refuse to read the book by the same name.) So, I’ve been walking this fine line of deciding where my faith is, and why it is there, and how I can participate in Indian spiritual communities without being Hindu. How can I beeline to the coolest Guru in all of India and parallel this with a disaffected answer when questioned about my religion? “Umm… I’m Buddhist or Christian,” my eyes trace the floor, “or something.”
At any time in the past year or two, the thought hasn’t been foreign to me of trying to “quit Art of Living.” (In one tape, Sri Sri jokes about how it’s impossible—“You can try, then one morning, in the shower, you find yourself singing ‘Jai Jai Radha Ramana Hari Bol’!” [The bhajan sung to close every Satsang in the past several years]) I’ve frequently reflected about leaving the organization and bringing Sri Sri’s knowledge and practices back to a more solidly Christian or Buddhist life. Still, when I arrived at the Bangalore Ashram at the beginning of February to meet with a dear friend from the North (“Heeeeeeey, Budd-IE!”) who had been staying there for six months, I was at a loss to hear him say that he had often been overcome by doubts about leaving Art of Living and joining the Catholic Church. (Which is, to my interest, and possibly my interest alone, much closer to the good coffee shops in Bangalore than the Art of Living ashram.) Yet, through my four months of India, now I could not sympathize with him more. He spoke of a time when a (particularly dogmatic?) ashramite interrupted his singing of a Christian song in the kitchen with an admonition that he should be singing the morning arati, a traditional Sanskrit prayer. Not only is the prayer in arcane, complex Sanskrit, much too hard for the uninitiated, (admittedly, my budd-IE is quite “initiated”) it is actually one that I have never, in four years of traveling with Guruji and listening to his lectures both live and on any of several dozen recordings, heard him talk about or recommend. **
Before leaving home, I found myself on one or two occasions, crying or on the brink of tears at the thought of how much Art of Living meant to me yet also how much I wanted to escape the organization, at least at its weaker moments. During this study, so much of the focus has been directly at learning about Indian society, (though the title and objective is to understand [Indian] Spiritual Community— explaining the disparage between my studying and the study itself will actually be a short essay on its own in my final paper, so more on that later) so a lot of what I have come in touch with is the real life dogmatism of different Hindu groups, and how different branches of Hinduism view and treat different groups of people. I’ve learned a lot about the kind of stories of the Gods told in the Vedas versus those of the Puranas. *** The way religious difference shapes the ways Indians treat each other (sometimes positively accepting, sometimes distancing, and at unfortunate but seemingly regular intervals, violently) the way they justify worldly actions and the way they view other religions and cultures are all great sources of doubt for me continuing on the path of yoga without having firmer ideas of my own faith and where it lies in relation to Hinduism, and, in a larger scope, where my personal cultural identity lies with respect to India. ****
I faced this a lot in Rishikesh when I was pressed between visiting the Dalai Lama and foregoing the experience. (Luckily, the decision was made for me as I broke my leg.) It was this same emotional confusion that made leaving Bangalore ashram so hard when I realized I could not stay there with a broken leg. In the torrent of frustrations, I thought I might never return, because of my own obstinence, and that scared me. And, as these thoughts set in, I was about to sit down and write about this confusion yesterday in the early afternoon.
It is all part of a struggle that I have been experiencing of whether or not Indian society is wholly deplorable to the values I was raised with. (The answer, of course, is that it is not, to make myself clear; but at times I definitely lack the right sort of intelligence to understand the culture through my own eyes, from my own moccasins.)
As I was about to have a coffee and get out my journal, a particularly placid street-hawker came up and showed me the beautiful cards he was selling, and I actually humored him, something I haven’t done in a long time with hawkers. After talking to him, I thought to call the local Art of Living group, remembering that I wanted to see if I could do the group Sudarshan Kriya practice before going home.
I got hold of the right person in the end and he seemed enthusiastic about there being a special program that day (yesterday) for Guruji’s 50th Birthday. Initially I was only interested in the Kriya, but I wanted to also attend a satsang to lift my spirits out of the blue. I figured it would be an excellent way to honor Guruji’s birthday, something I had wanted to do anyway. I packed up for one night and took an auto-rickshaw to Trivandrum and walked around (probably too much, my ankle is sore again :( ) before coming to the Kerala Ashram for the celebration.
After a short initial satsang, there was a Guru Puja. There were about 400 people there, and I was the only non-Indian. An announcement came in Malayam: “Blah blah blah blah Guru Puja Course Phase 1 or Phase 2, blah blah blah blah,” motioning to the front stage with the puja altar. Some people began to walk up to sit on the stage. He had made an announcement for people who had been taught the puja to come up on stage. “Do I go? I’m the only non-Indian here! That attracts so much attention. So many Indians will be weird if I go up on stage.” I pictured wide smiles, and a dozen people asking, “You’re from which place? You are working? You are traveling alone?”
I counter-reasoned: reciting the puja from my place in the audience might draw a more concentrated attention from the people surrounding me. “Maybe I should go up and do the puja because it is the natural thing to do. I’m following the flow of events.” (After thinking about it this much, nothing about the decision was “natural.”)
I went up. I took a seat and was given flowers to offer. It was a beautiful puja, a very blessed moment. Of the 400 people attending, there were only about a dozen of us who were on stage. I was self-conscious, but more absorbed in the puja, all in all. The satsang after the puja was blissful. About 40 minutes of really great music and there was wonderfully energetic devotion from all around. I was out of my head, literally, singing along, so conscious of how my mood had completely changed from earlier that day. An unexpected dance followed, traditional Indian dance, though (as far as my limited knowledge of Indian and Keralan dance goes) seemingly quite modern. It was amazing, one of the best Indian dances I’ve ever seen. I kept thinking, “This is better than the stuff they had us watch at Silver Jubilee, hands down!” As, for twenty minutes, the dancers held one another in positions that I didn’t think I could support my own body weight in, everyone was hushed except for moving one another out of the way so they could see better. More satsang followed, then prasad (dinner), then I was given a place to stay at the ashram for the night, followed by morning Kriya. A beautiful gift. And now, with a smile on my face, I am again entranced by what India can offer at times, and I wonder, just how Hindu am I???

* Essentially, (very essentially) there’s a basic conflict that people have labeled as some form of dualism again and again throughout the history of the world’s philosophies. If spiritual teachings don’t lie, then we are unchanging spirits, made up entirely of love and abundant with bliss, the abode of heaven; yet the body has many needs in the world, and the mind has a multitude of desires—circumstance put us in conflict with others in fulfilling these needs and desires, and we deal with this stress in any number of ways, all the while with that same “abode of heaven” in our hearts. Is it just sophomoric to say that existence is one big identity crisis? In some way, maybe my American identity is largely my consumer identity (aren’t we labeled a consumer culture?) and my conditioned stress reactions, and the yogic path is the dialogue of that spirit conflicting with my basic “tribal identity” if my American consumerism.

** One of the most interesting Q&A moments I got in translation from his Hindi talks in Rishikesh, one devotee wanted the advice of Guruji on a seemingly important matter: “What shradhas [religious observations / recitations of prayers] should we do daily?” Guruji’s answer (for an audience that was a vast majority of Hindu Indians, a smaller group of Sikh Indians and a small “residue” of Guru-chasers from outside India, who anyway couldn’t understand what he was saying without translation): “Go ask a pundit.” There wasn’t a trace of stepping down from the question, Guruji actually seemed to make his answer endorse any path of religiosity.

*** This is an interesting development in my little worldview, ever since studying early Christianity about four years ago, I have usually said, whenever I got “into it” with someone (I rarely do…) that I mostly believe in the New Testament and not the Old Testament, because of the often cited difference in the way the sources talk about God. The Old Testament speaks of a wrathful God, one that should be feared, and Jesus spoke of a God that was pure love, a benevolent, non-judgmental provider for all. The latter jived with my optimistic view of a world of transcendental purity, all strawberries and cream on the inside. Thanks largely to a comparison that Wolpert makes in his history, India, I realized that this is actually not very different at all from, for a direct example, the Gods of the Vedas and their violent power struggles, and attempts to fulfill a myriad of desires, and the kind of God that Krishna speaks of or the kinds of yogis described in the Upanishads.

**** There is an undying insistence of many Hindus that there is nothing that can ever conflict between their religion and another… though this makes for great interpersonal acceptance, this is subtly chauvinistic and denies of other faiths the tenets of their beliefs that actually do make them different forms of faith.
I even had a man include this on his obligatory five-minute summary of the faith that I was subjected to last night as I got ready for bed. I had told him only that I was writing about India, catalyzing his sermon, which he ended with “I tell you this because it came up.” His highest concern was that, being schooled in the West, I would have only been told of Hinduism, “that we stand on snakes and pray to many statues.” Though I had many opportunities to do so, I lacked the energy to contradict him and launch a debate, only rejecting his insistence that India had no deserts, which was his way of citing how non-Indians over-harvest resources and how Indians themselves were innocent of opportunistic over harvesting and other ecological abuses. Actually, during the conversation, I kept thinking how the conversation was the best example of a somewhat questionably educated Indian who was convinced that he was correct and had the only possible outlook—he wouldn’t listen to a word I said, not even pausing at my injection about the Thar desert as I tripped over my incredulity: “It’s like one of the largest deserts in the world!” Though, his son, my age, smiled.
To cite a (common) example of the Hindu belief that their faith does not come into conflict, at the Sivananda Ashram, one Christian woman, with much sympathy from the group, injected that she wanted nothing to do with the satsang where we chanted the traditional praise of Hindu Gods and the gurus of Sivananda’s Shankaracharya tradition, every morning and night, and the teacher, insisting that the satsangs were mandatory for people staying at the ashram, said that they weren’t in conflict with the Christian religion or any other, and all of us were left reflecting on how 90% of the interpretations of the First Commandment don’t readily conform to the teacher’s understanding of religiosity.

"God's Own Country"

2006-05-09T02:13:00.000-07:00

Kerala's state mantra is "God's Own Country".... just to quote Ani in two consecutive blogs: "This may be God's Country, but this is my country too, move over mister holy, let the little people through..."

One week left. Thus far I've stayed in eight of India's 29 (or so) states, adding two more, Haryana and Maharashtra if you count transit. As I recount the trip, it seems both to have taken an immense amount of time and it seems cut short. It seems I've done a million things and had as many experiences, and it also seems so limited. The thought of coming home to familiar circumstances and familiar conversations has made me reflect, why did I come here? What did I expect to find? With endless trails of roads and jet streams behind me now, what, exactly, is supposed to be different?
India is an interesting place because the nationals live a life so often confusing to a foreigner who is a passive witness, yet all the other foreigners are in a state of flux also. Most foreigners, in India, are simply not settled. India makes a foreigner surrender to the hectic speed and rituals of daily life, and it still manages to jostle the surrendered foreigner out of comfort. Visitors here move. Conversations of the visitors are about movement-where one has been and where they are headed. It is rare for a foreigner to be holding any place in India that constitutes for a regular life, and those that do have a weathered state of detachment about life in India that dazzles more transient foreigners. For the average foreigner, India is something that happens between two fragments of reality. It is the evanescent transition, that moment in the night when you are awake between two periods of sleep-the comforting sleep of a familiar life.
Hindus and Buddhists subscribe to the doctrine of samsara, which I see translated in a lot of precursory introductions to the philosophy as "reincarnation." Yet, particularly Buddhist teachers will not give this definition. Samsara is an endless ocean that one crosses in search of salvation, enlightenment, nirvana. Samsara is a wheel of births that one is pinned under, and as time passes, samsara is the direct attachment to suffering. We are on shaky rafts cross this endless ocean that is usually under high-storm.
Living in India, at least as a foreigner, I feel like such a philosophy being born out of the land is really understandable. Suffering is everywhere, life and plans are rarely certain, and there's always a pinch of pain to wake you up when things get jostled. In a way, a trip to India is like the stormy night on the Ocean before one can return to the comforts of a new incarnation, the protection that the physical body provides for the soul. A return to home.
I realized at least once in my last days at Bangalore that part of what I was experiencing was my anticipated reverse culture shock. I had left so much of India behind by growing roots in the center of the comforts of Bangalore. (Actually, a book that I saw in a store about the modernization and cosmopolitization [I just made that word up...] of the city, called Bangalor'd has, for it's cover, a glassy photo of Brigade street, taken from exactly the spot where my hotel was!) Leaving "India" and returning to my own mirage of conceptions of "material culture" as presented itself in Bangalore left me like a ghost-searching for home because I thought it might be there, but unable to find it in hollow illusions. So much shopping, so much "normal food", so much coffee, after all was said, I was almost able to be "myself."
This occurred to me again as I got on the train for Trivandrum. I had been told before leaving home that riding on the train was one of the quintessential experiences of India, and that I simply must do it to sample Indian life. I managed to put off the infamously confusing and frustrating experience as much as possible, but I did take the experience, saving myself about $50 versus the airfare from Bangalore to Trivandrum.
I was about ten minutes early for the train, paying the porters far too much, and sitting down in a lifelessly blue seat under unforgiving lighting in a train that smelled unmistakably like urine. I flagged down the first chai-wallah to pass, and enjoyed a cup as I settled in to my seat, wondering who (and how bad) my neighboring passengers would be in the 6-8 sleeper beds that faced each other.
I could have cried when, after about 5 minutes, my first neighbor arrived-a Westerner somewhere near her fifties who, to my very pleasant surprise, was also headed to the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala, and to my astounding shock, does all of the Art of Living practices daily. My neighbor was a Godsend.
I almost did cry when my other neighbors set in-two families of young Indian parents with small children. Would there be any peace? Would there be any hope for it?
The heart of the train, unsympathetic, pulled us all Southward, and the 17-hour journey began.
Unwisely, I think I had one chai too many. When the mother of one of the families related that she needed me to turn off my light if her child was going to sleep, I laid, very awake, contorting my position to refract more light on the pages I tried to read, or hold a key-chain light up to the words. After one or two hours of this, I gave up, and stretched out, listening to the sound of tracks being swallowed back by the train, a flowing water that marked distance and passing night.
One of the fathers woke me up clumsily as he thrust his hand into one of my body parts, supporting himself with my sleeper bench as he balanced himself to sit up in the early morning. Wide awake and startled, not to mention infuriated, I acted like I was sleepily tossing and turning and sent a heavy leg down on his hand, pushing it off my sleeper. Revenge had been taken; the enemy was pushed off my territory. I tried to cool my mind and fall back sleep for about an hour, but eventually gave in to one mother talking with an auntie on the bench opposite mine, and the all-too-proximate sound of children waking.
Much of the rest of the ride was spent working through readings and trying to guess what was being served as chaat-wallahs walked down corridors or outside the train at stations bull-frogging the name of their item, "Chyaaaaaaaayaaaaah." Tea. "Kofeeeeeeeeeeee." Coffee. "Vaaaaaaaaaaaadaaaaaaaaa-doooooosaaaaaaaaaa." Vada-rice fritters or Dosa, rice pancakes; as you like. Those are about the only ones I figured out; though the banana pakora was amazing, I never figured out how to tell if someone was selling it. Whenever I was hungry, the hot-dog vendor voices of chaat-wallahs sporting tasty Indian goods were a consistent source of frustration and distraction: "What's he selling? Man... where are the banana pakora?"

At some time around three, we arrived in Trivandrum and, still sporting my crutches, I panicked about getting my luggage off the train before it lurched forward again. With the help of my Godsend and the porters she sent, all was taken care of, and we quickly got a taxi up to the Sivananda Ashram, Neyyar Dam, via a very nice snack restaurant for fresh water and edibles.
Driving through Kerala was quite striking after my other experiences in India... I quickly met with my first wall branded with hammer and sickle in the traditional Soviet style, and realized almost as quickly that these were the abundant norm. The occasional BJP symbol-an orange and green lotus, rears its head through the myriads of hammer and sickles; it's almost heartwarming to see some political competition, even if it is the BJP. My doubts about the BJP's association with Hindutva movements, those of racial and ideological "cleansing", are somewhat milder now, as I've come to understand that actually most of the political parties in India are seriously questionable in American strandards. Varma (see closing note below) dedicates the first quarter of his book asserting that Indian society is traditionally undemocratic and amoral and everything here is at the whim of power dynamics and an infinite cornucopia of circumstance-this makes for strange politics! That being said, the run-of-the-mill Communist parties of Kerala aren't the Maoist Naxalites that cause havoc further North-East; the BJP is not the Nazi regime that some of their associates may be quoted as glorifying. It's just India, simultaneously harmless and virulent. Also more noticeable here are the myriad of Christian churches and prominence of invocations of a more familiar God and Prophet on billboards. Even Bangalore has a marked Christian presence, but further South, it actually seems to hush theological competition. Muslims never successfully dominated India's deep South, what is now Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but that only means Hinduism has remained especially strong with uninterrupted traditions. So, I assume the noticeable occurrence of Christianity here is due only to effective missionary work, but a part of me always hopes it is from dutiful St. Thomas traveling to Chennai and studying there, leading to Christian churches in southern India that predate the Vatican.
The Sivananda Ashram is set in the almost redundantly beautiful Keralan Malabar Coast. The entire coast seems to be lined with palm fronds and coconut trees, above which no buildings are taller, as the Rough Guide notes. The trees and foliage give Kerala an endless synonymy with the color green. Actually, Neyar Dam is particularly lovely. The road climbs up to the foothills of the area and there is a wildlife reserve and park situated around Sivananda Ashram and the dam. One effect the wildlife preserve has is that during pretty much any time of day, silence is broken not by winds passing through the palms, but what Lucy Edge described in her book, Yoga School Dropout, as lions copulating in the reserve, the other side of the lake in front of the ashram.
Satsangs, the evening gatherings of chanting and meditation, are a bit low-key here and ritualized, making me long for a healthy Art of Living satsang. Actually, pretty much everything here I am comparing with Art of Living, and it's giving me some space to step back and look at both Sivananda and Art of Living. The asana classes are great, and are providing the healing I was looking for, and it is great to be with so many cool people.
After five days or so, we met with out first weekly "day off" and a trip was organized to Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. Kanyakumari is the southern tip of India, where the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal surrender to the Indian Ocean. Its namesake is the chaste goddess who stood in place performing tapas, religious austerities, on a rock off the shore, waiting to have her hand given to Lord Shiva in marriage. The town has a large Vivekananda Ashram and a memorial to the same saint, so famous for bringing Eastern philosophy abroad, and also offshore on the same rock. Kanyakumari also features, on a nearby rock, a giant statue of sage Thiruvalluvar (see the photo), and, on shore, a temple dedicated to Kanya Kumari.
The trip sounded great. En route to Tamil Nadu, we stopped in at a natural waterfall near the Kerala - Tamil Nadu state line, Triparappu Falls, and had breakfast served on a banana leaf. (Photo included of a particularly wonderful friend at the Sivananda Ashram with his idli-sambar.)

These next photos are from Padamanabhapuram Palace, the old headquarters of a South Indian dynasty, the Travancore Kingdom... it's a remarkable complex of wooden palaces...

The next stop was the Vivekananda ashram where we ate lunch. A few of us walked out to the beach, where the included photos were taken, and on the way back, I was realizing just how worn out my newly strengthened right leg was. I had just given up the crutches two days before.
After the bus ride down to the beach in the main part of Kanyakumari, I felt refreshed and able to walk a bit more, which was good because I was hustled to the ferry, about 3/4 of a mile away, the whole group rushing when I was barely able to keep a strolling pace. Arriving at the Vivekanda memorial (offshore, on the rock) I convinced myself it was worthwhile to walk around and see it since I was there. About half way through my chin was crunching up, my lips quivering, my throat shaking-completely ready to cry in pain and frustration. Interestingly, I kept making the same decision-to walk around and see the temple or what not, to walk out and get cash from an ATM that I desperately needed, or to walk, again, through one more temple. My ankle was visibly swelling as the day passed, and each time I sat down, I wasn't totally sure I'd be able to walk any more for the day.
When all was said and done, I walked at least three or four miles on a weak ankle, and have spent the three days since then on my back in my ashram room, coming out only for meals and for asana classes, and, increasingly, for service. This is convenient, as I wanted to avoid the lectures and rustic satsangs, however, doing so without injuring myself would have been preferable. I have plenty of time to rest, in the beautiful ashram refuge from the surrounding coconut and palm jungle of Kerala.
Regardless, tons of pictures are included, and it is time for asana class again! Lots of friends are making plans to escape the ashram and go to the local beach towns, but I think I'll pass, and enjoy my last stint of ashram life in India. The idea of organizing travel right now seems so beyond me it's not funny. Anyhow, I'll probably right next time from the airport, as Internet's not so easy here. I don't know the date at all, but I have very good reason to believe I have just one week left. Jai guru dev!

PS... for anyone who's keeping up with my reading , I finished Stanley Wolpert's (rather good) book India, on national history, and have moved on to Pavan K Varma's (I think that's his name!) Being Indian which is actually totally amazing and compelling....

Civil Disobedience

2006-04-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

I found this in the History book I'm reading now, India, by Stanley Wolpert, it is in reaction to Britain's prolonging of martial law after the end of World War 1, just to give you all the fair historical backdrop... originally published in Gandhi's periodical "Young India"...
Anyhow, it reminded me of the blog I wrote yesterday....

"Civil disobedience seems to be a duty imposed upon every lover of personal and public liberty." -Mahatma Gandhi

I'm going to Trivandrum in my Mind.

2006-04-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

I think I could live forever in Bangalore and not really learn a thing about India. That being said, it’s my last night here. In a way, I’m going to take “one quick dip” into India—travelling to southern Kerala for a two week “Yoga Vacation” at the well known Sivananda Ashram near Trivandrum (I’ve taken to using the old word for the city, as I initially couldn’t remember the city’s proper/modern name: Trivananthpuram). In another way, I’ve already long since left the subcontinent. The more I learn about India, the more it becomes something very separate from yoga—two different kinds of communities, not that either could be grouped into a single community. So, as I go south, I realize that my time at Sivananda will be no more the “real India” than Rishikesh, the city of saints, or hiding away in any other ashram. The life of yoga ashrams is as much an escape from India as it is from city life in the West, and this realization is the hardest and heaviest-hitting one of my trip. To reiterate my post from a couple weeks ago, “Sacrilege and Sanctity”—there is no “Holy Land”, not in the bazaars of India, not in the war torn Middle East. It doesn’t exist, our Home, wherever it may be, cannot be approached with plane tickets or bus fare; it is not of this world… basic enough, right?
So, what do I mean that I’ve “left” India? I’m feeling more and more that India is a land, not better or worse than any other. It just is—all the political crud, all the social snafus, and all the inner beauty of the individuals who give life its beauty by the perseverance of their spirit through the day-to-day trials that make life what it is. India, I this way, is interchangeable with every other nation. Its ancient traditions and modern flare make it wonderful, even as they make it almost incomprehensible, and all in all, it doesn’t really mean a thing. I’m American—if I’ve learned nothing else on this trip, I’ve learned that I really am American, and I’ve learned the value of that in my own heart and mind. I still think guns are stupid. I still wouldn’t die for my country; I wouldn’t even kill for it. But when I yell at someone over ten or twenty rupees, I think, “Damn straight. Layin’ down the American concepts of justice and equity.”
On the way up to the Canadian Ashram just before coming to India, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s latest, “A Man with No Country.” Vonnegut was arguing that because of all the billion ways he disagrees with American politicians, he feels he isn’t a person of the land or nation himself. I couldn’t disagree more. Because of those disagreements, I believe he (and I) are all the more part of America, because being American has all of that wrapped up in it. I’m thinking now of an Ani song—“I love my country / by which I mean / I am indebted joyfully / to all the people throughout its history / who have fought the government to make right” (from Grand Canyon off of the album Educated Guess).
Anyhow, what I mean to say by this is not that being American and loving my country is some wishy-washy mindlessly submissive patriotism where whatever the guys in power says “goes.” Being American (I wrote a whole essay about this at the beginning of my trip that I can’t wait to revisit!) is, for me, something very powerful. Americans, with so many rich inputs from so many cultures, have a history (and a duty) to lend a compassionate and understanding eye to people in need everywhere. The same eye is a critical eye when it looks on corruption, transferring the same energy as Shiva’s third eye, burning up evil at its root. At least, as an American, I hope this is the role I can fulfill. To me, this seems to all be “American” because it is the concept I have of myself and my power and my attitude towards life that I have grown up with, all the time being American all the way. (Maybe “Being American” just means “Being Me”… every time I attempt to write about this, whether in the essay three months ago that I still haven’t edited and typed up, or in last week’s blog or right now, in writing about race and nationality and social dynamics, it’s so much easier to go to extremes of condemnation and praise than it is to talk about social elements as they are.)
Regardless, what I have just written about, the powers of compassion and understanding and the will to fight, for me, they are all American traits. Do not read: “Exclusively American”; do not read: “Originally American.” As an American, the lines dividing me from other cultures aren’t just blurry, they don’t actually exist. As an American, every part of my culture is part of an ocean fed by all the worlds’ cultural rivers. To be a US citizen is, for me, to inherit the whole world, for everyone to be my ancestor. Stepping back from my own little identity-crisis-in-the-making, being American means, at the very least, that I am not just Indian. I don’t need or desire to imbibe this culture any more than my broken Hindi or daily yoga practice necessitates. I am quite comfortable with being a “dinner-table multiculturalist” if that’s what this makes me.
So, in short, I’m ready to go home. There’s not a whole lot more that India holds for me at this point. In my search for peace and knowledge, I’d do anything to have the peace of my own bedroom—I’d do anything to track down the knowledge that’s in the last season of Six Feet Under, not to mention the fact that if I spent less time worrying about where to find good food and a place to rest, I could probably actually read a bit more.
I just saw Paul Mayeda Berges (Bend it like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice) new movie (has it been out in the States long? It’s just opening here…) Mistress of Spices. Though not absolutely perfect, it was wonderful in communicating its ideas. The crux of it, to me, seemed to echo Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, which I read as part of my acculturation just before flying to India. The idea is that for an Indian in America (and, in my reading/viewing, for an American in India) it’s impossible and impractical to live in the land without compromising to the culture, and yet, it’s also just as impossible and every bit as impractical to try and live a life without paying respects to and bringing in the important elements from your own mother culture. So, here’s me, running around India with my rough Indian head-wobble, which I seem to use at the wrong moment sometimes, and my broken Hindi, and my Hindu rosary, clinging on to all my American past that I see fit—clinging on to my values and my cosmology, and desperately insisting, “no, I’m not a Hindu.”
(Fun story: A Tibetan asked me the other day if I was a monk because I was buying some particularly pious things from his “Tibetan Store” [that’s the name of the store] I smiled wide at the question and said, “I’m a monk in disguise.” Which I thought was clever enough, but he insisted: “What monastery are you from?” “Umm, I’m with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Hunh?” “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Oh. Ravi Shankar. Hindu.” He was disheartened. I defended, “No no, I’m not a Hindu…” and proceeded to try to define my religio-spiritual identifications.)
I was writing home to a friend yesterday, and came upon a really great thought— “it’s weird to leave India with so many dreams and fantasies of the Orient still unfulfilled.” I’ve been facing this a lot lately. I haven’t tracked down any Sufi pirs—I’ve thus not learned to spin in circles to achieve a drunken state of ecstatic union with “the Beloved.” I haven’t tracked down any wise Buddhist monks who thus haven’t taught me about the suffering in existence through the communion of their pregnant and knowing silence. I haven’t hiked up the Himalayas to stow away in a cave and learn lessons on yoga from an emaciated dread-locked Sadhu. Okay, so, whatever, I have done stuff really close to all of that, but still, as desires (that Buddhist monk I didn’t meet yet would be proud) they all remain unfulfilled and self-perpetuated, as desires generally do. Instead of ahimsa (non-violence), I find I generally slaughter mosquitoes en masse. Instead of acceptance and understanding, I find half the time I am thinking somewhat racist generalizations that end in the thought “Dumb Schmuck” that I don’t care to write more about on the blog. Instead of inner peace and equanimity, I find I am usually hung-over from the previous day’s coffee and tea consumption and unable to sit still during morning meditation. Virtually all of the Buddhist monks I’ve met in India are just the co-habitants of the Tibetan Hotel I’ve been staying at for the past week. They are hall-mates who pass by with a smile, not personal teachers who transmit ancient sutras to me. Okay, fine.
As I said earlier, I have done enough spiritual traveling while dragging my suitcases around India to be more than happy with the trip. I’ve had great moments with Sri Sri. (While explaining that I was studying Indian Spirituality to a Bangalorean in a coffee shop today, he asked, “Have you learned about Ravi Shankar?” Cha-ching. I felt really “on track.”) I’ve had wonderful, transcendent conversations with friends. I’ve experienced blissful, ecstatic moments of dissolution of my thoughts and worries that I can’t describe. I’ve been part of spiritual movements with Art of Living that I never thought would take place in my life anywhere in the world. So, it really is just the nature of desire to want to have all these other experiences. I still want them, for sure, but the desire is stronger now to reunite with American culture and its own spirituality. John Keay wrote in “Into India” about how the solemnity that sanctifies a Western religious experience has no place in the noisy, bustling temples of Hinduism, and from the realization that gave me, I have been longing for the quiet community of a Christian church and the individuality that is somehow more respected in Western religious communities. (I just killed a mosquito.)
Anyhow, compounding all these personal frustrations that have been producing the kinds of thoughts that I’ve been writing about now and last week, is the very real actuality of my leg. I had the cast taken off a couple days ago—now the 6 week mark from breaking my poor lil’ tibia. I initially tried to quite the crutches cold turkey, and found instantly that I had a mean limp and a swollen ankle. Rotating, stretching, and otherwise “working” the joint in the nights and morning gives way to sharp pains and ominous cracking. (Got another mosquito. Actually, make that two more.) Frustrated from pain and efforts, I am scared shitless that it won’t heal completely. The prospect of carrying with me a limp or random nerve pain is both sobering and fierce. I am both mourning the (hopefully ‘temporary’) loss of mobility and freedom, and also impressed with gratitude and wonder about how much of a miracle of health and ability I still have. Walking around Rishikesh without my glasses the day that I had my new pairs made gave me a lot of perspective about having my five senses working, and I think I’ve already written a lot about how being in India with a broken leg is quite a bit like being a constant by-stander. Only when absorbed in reading or writing or watching television can I really forget myself and my (again, hopefully temporary) handicap. Yet, this same “forgetting of myself” is what has grown to become my reminder of, “I am not this body.” A reminder which becomes transcendent at moments. Yet, whether I am my body or not, the thought of not being able to walk normally again does scare me shitless. So, in closing, yes, Mom, I did start using my crutches again.

The Bangalore Confusion

2006-04-23T03:26:00.000-07:00

The past days, after finishing panchakarma, the week of traditional Ayurvedic cleansing, I have been staying in the heart of Bangalore’s Brigade Road area, a conglomeration of a few streets that do their best to convince expatriots and IT professionals alike that they are in a city like any other. The people who are homeless or crippled who inch themselves along, asking for baksheesh and the autorickshaw drivers waiting for you at either end of Brigade Road are the reminders that, yes, indeed, you are in the southern heart of the Deccan plateau.
I’m so used to life in India that I am equally as pleased to find a deal at Pizza Hut or a great new invention of the Indian incarnation of Subway as I am to find a local chaat-wallah (urban Indian snack food) the South Indian Hotel (roadside dhaba-restaurant) around the corner, serving up spicier eats for 1/5th the price. So I’ve spent the last few days sipping on coffees at the Indian equivalent of Starbucks, Barista where the equivalent of a $5 coffee is one for Rs. 50 (about $1.10, I’ll take it while I can get it! Which reminds me, I better get some caffeine in my blood before it gets too late…) and after spending on coffee what local people spend to feed a family for a day, I walk out an bicker with autorickshaw drivers over 10 rupees here or there, (about 25 cents, this can, and often does, turn into a heated argument) not to save the money, but for the idea of not getting charged more than anyone else because of my skin color.
I did this exact thing two days ago. Of course, it was not a heated argument this time. I walked out of a movie (Ice Age 2!) that I paid 500 rupees ($12) for, about 5 times a normal cinema price here, to watch it in a theater with food included in the ticket price, waiters, and reclining “La-Z-Boy” style seats with plush, cushioned arm rests. Exiting the theater, I argued with the auto driver to get the price down to Rs. 60 from Rs. 70 (I paid him Rs. 65 after he agreed to 60—it’s really not about the money…)
So, today I’ve left behind my coffee bars and air-conditioned restaurants to visit the Bangalore Art of Living ashram again before leaving. I’ve decided to go to Kerala and practice yoga at the Sivananda Ashram near Trivandrum, close to the southern tip of India before heading home—I’m hoping to straighten out my posture and strengthen my arms and legs again—the cast comes off in three days. I’m also coming home early, to get my work for the study turned in on time and to leave myself more opportunities to do the things I was hoping to do this summer. Of course I wanted to spend time at the Canadian Art of Living Center as I’ve been doing for the past several summers, but I also have been invited to live and work with a friend and Art of Living teacher, probably up in New Jersey, and that seems like a great prospect. So, all said and done, I am leaving India in three weeks, it will be one day short of exactly four months.
The prospect of leaving soon, plus my “Western life” here in Bangalore has given me plenty to think about, however, my most interesting observation lately has been that I, myself, am not really making as many observations now. After a week of bed rest and intensive reading (during Panchakarma), I feel like I can talk about Indian society and write about it, but I feel numb to it as I watch it go on around me. While my sister visited at the beginning of the month, I was eager to say, “That’s normal, that’s normal, and that… that’s also normal.” As we passed by cows in the middle of the street, tailgating “Goods Carrier” trucks and men urinating on public walls. This has, however, become my experience. Everything I see just seems to be “The way it is,” and I feel I no longer have a real bearing on rational or normal behavior.
As I’m getting ready to leave India, casting my thoughts half way around the world to DC, to Virginia, I can’t help but leave this whole message as a half-thought. I don’t really know where I am now; I don’t know where I’ll be when I come home. I have learned a lot about Indian society and Indian history, but, just as 6 weeks ago I found I was trying to “enter” that illusion of India, now I find I am trying to find that illusion, feeling that I am already amidst it.
For now, I’m in the lap of luxury in Bangalore. As I get tired of resting my foot and my mind, I will gradually switch back from the movies and sitcoms and hit the books like I was last week. After the cast comes off, I’ll be in the thickly traditional state of Kerala as monsoon approached, and yet, I’ll be in a fairly non-Indian community at the Sivananda ashram. Wish me luck, I’m sending love.

Gitanjali & Addendum to "the Day After..."

2006-04-17T01:58:00.000-07:00

My deepest apologies to anyone who looked at the blog in the last day or so… I did get those new pictures up, but I was clueless for how to shrink them down to normal size, my HTML knowledge being superficial, at best…
What I am, however, good at is Adobe Photoshop, so I just shrunk the images, so, fingers crossed, hopefully the page looks a little better now…
One note after getting the images done for real-- I did have to shrink them down using HTML, Lynn, do I hear, "Information Technology competency"????>

Anyhow, a few updates on the last post, “The Day After the Music Died” – The street I am staying on has actually, for a long time, been named after the actor—Dr. RajKumar Rd. The section of town, Rajajinagar, I quickly realized, was also in his namesake. All this making me feel more than slightly foolish for my initial reaction of “I don’t care if an actor is passing through!”

At least 6 people died in the riots, including one police officer. The number of vandalized busses was something like 175 I believe, between the two leading companies. His picture is hanging, garlanded, from many buildings in the area, and, as life picks up its pace again in Bangalore, I find myself second guessing my complaints against Filmy music being played loudly in public, not wanting to offend.

That’s all the gossip for now…
I’ve been reading a bit from Tagore’s Gitanjali (lit. “Songs of Offering”) each day and I’ve been meaning to share this one with everyone… sums up some of the harder times here :)
Rabindranath Tagore, for those who know about as much about Indian culture as I did not-too-long-ago was a 19th century Bengali (Eastern India) poet, philosopher, writer, saint and forgive-me-for-forgetting-any-other-hats. As I’ve been reading in Naipaul, he was connected with a movement that was giving value to Indian nationalism amongst Indian people, when before there was only identification with one’s immediate caste or social group, and definitely no strong nationalist bridges between the communities of India’s 30-some major languages. As John Keay or William Dalrymple (how’s that for an academic citation?) said about Tagore, to read his poetry in any languages is powerful, to read it in its original Bengali is stunning (a good omen for a cultural revivalist).
Anyway, this is the 14th poem in Gitanjali a la (my slight rewording of) my little Rabindra Rachanavali translation, I hope you all like it:

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful,
But you have always saved me with hard refusals;
This strong mercy has become part of my life,
Through and through.

Day by day, you are making me worthy
Of the simple, great gifts that you gave to me unasked—
This sky and the light, this body and this life and the mind—
Saving me from the perils of too much desire.

There are times when I languidly linger
And times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal.
But cruelly, you hide yourself from me.

Day by day, you are making me worthy of your full acceptance
By refusing me again and again,Saving me from the perils of weak, uncertain desire.

----- Oodles of pics- Delhi & Jaipur

2006-04-15T01:59:00.000-07:00

A note on the photos –
The one of myself and Sri Sri is by one awesome Schlomoe :) A beautiful gift… About two days before I broke my ankle…

The one of the lady washing clothes is in Brindavan, the birthplace of Krishna. One of those everyday sites that I actually thought to take a picture of (unlike the lentils photo, see my comment below about Jeff)

Another “everyday site”: The mangled bus, we saw on the way from Jaipur to Delhi. Though all visitors seemed to be wooed by how chaotic traffic seems to be without there being billions of accidents, there is a higher incidence of traffic accidents, and when they do happen, well, they’re pretty severe. Let’s all thank God speed limits are usually below 60 here… 60 km/h…
oi… Addendum #2-- I saw a city bus hit a motorcycle yesterday… everyone was fine… I crutched away a little faster.

From Delhi, there are two photos—one of the Baha’ii Lotus Temple, another of the Sufi shrine, the one in the “bad neighborhood”—photo taken from across the tracks, literally.

One photo from the bird sanctuary, Keoladeo, though, of course, it was just for the scenery, no birds :)

The second half of the photos are from beautiful Amber Fort Palace, just outside of Jaipur. The one of the snacks stall (with the Swastik made out of lentils) was taken by Jeff, one of the “normal scenes of India” that I’d grown so accustomed to that I didn’t appreciate it until I saw the photo… Props to Jeff! Anyway, beautiful gardens, a couple beautiful mirrored halls, one of which was residence to the Rani, the Queen, and, of course, one of the holy men in orange (though it looks more like pink) resting….

The Day After the Music Died

2006-04-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

“Sean?!?” My sister reprimands.
“What???” Maybe I was more than a little defensive. “He kicked my crutch!”
The day was, apparently, a particularly crowded one at the Baha’ii Temple in New Delhi, “the Lotus Temple.” Though, we never quite pinned the reason for the traffic, to my recollection. We wanted to start the tour of the “Golden Triangle” with a few sites in Delhi, and the Lotus Temple was my first experience crutching the long walkways up to temples on this particular tour.
I was a bit cranky. I hadn’t slept until about five in the morning because I was not able to find my sister and her friend in the airport when they landed. I woke up in full speed at about ten in the morning, using the trusty Internet to check my e-mail for any news about just where in Delhi they were. After a haggard reunion (none of us had gotten a shower or sleep that was worth mentioning), a meal at their hotel, and an hour or two of sitting in our room for the night moaning, “Damn I’m tired,” we finally got out to see the first sight.
So, maybe it wasn’t necessary to hit this Indian boy with my crutch after he kicked my crutch. Maybe an eye for an eye makes the world go blind. But, really, I didn’t hit him hard.
Kim’s scolding gave me ample reason to reflect at how much I was letting India sculpt me into something I didn’t really want to be. As Kim and I walked and crutched (respectively) towards the parking lot, I explained to her, still defensive, that people in India just aren’t sensitive towards others’ personal spaces, and that pushing was very normal here. I related the moral of the serial killer in the movie Seven, “You can’t tap people on the shoulder any more to get their attention; you have to hit them with a sledge hammer.” I was pleased that she didn’t seem to take much surprise or shock at me justifying my actions with the words of a fictitious psychopath.
India has a way to make you rough at the edges. All the travelogues I read about India make light of the otherwise-fruity Westerners who come to ashrams for yogic transcendence and end up scolding people and doing unreasonably spiteful things. The theme of my sister’s visit for me was such—I noted how I was yelling at or cursing someone everyday (at one point, I reveled: “Alright! Today it wasn’t our driver that I yelled at!!!”) All the while I was given, by sister and her friend, Jeff, both fresh off the boat from the US, a new reference point for the obvious volatility that was so very unusual for me. I was only slightly comforted that, within three days, Kim herself was like a frustrated time bomb when Indians were unable to communicate or somehow in the way: “Alright, it’s not just me, I knew it…”
Leaving the Lotus Temple, we asked to see a specific Sufi (a mystic sect of Islam) shrine that the guidebook said was stunning. Our (Hindu) driver refused, “That area’s not nice.”
“But that’s where we want to go.” Our driver was getting close to earning his daily yelling-at.
“Neighborhood is not nice.” He insisted, then, as if to quantify how unpleasant it was, “It’s Muslim…”
I set full into my persistent baby talk of broken English that I have convinced myself is easier for Indians who are not fluent in the language to understand. “Muslim is also nice. We want to go. Go there, go there.” Pointing at my map like a mad man.
“No, we go to Arkshadam.”— A famous modern Hindu temple that is just across the Yamuna from the heart of New Delhi. I was disappointed that our paid driver was beginning to give orders on the first day of our tour.
My degenerated English: “We go here first. We stop on the way. Here. Hizrat Nizamuddin. First, then to Arkshadam.” I searched him for a response.
Settling into the highway driving, realizing I couldn’t be sure where he was going. The driver pulled the car over and said “Fifteen minutes, I waiting here.” We had, apparently, reached a compromise without my knowing. He stopped at a park along the highway from which one could see the Sufi shrine in the distance. We were safely on the other side of fenced railroad tracks from the “not nice” neighborhood. Amidst the upper middle class Hindus that populated the park, we caught a few photos and sat and relaxed for a minute before heading back to the car.
Arkshadam, however, was amazing. The temple complex is less than 40 years but the architecture is completely stunning. As it was after sunset, we hurried to see the musical fountain—sprays of water illumined by colored lights that was set to a twenty or thirty minute recording of Indian classical music. Watching the fountain made me feel like the child that I had taken to behaving like recently.
After the show, we went to the main shrine, devoted to Swami Narayan, a saint from the not-to-distant past, maybe 19th century (no exact data, I sent my literature safely home with Kim so I would be able to use it later), who was the star of the lineage. Even from the outside, with every centimeter elaborately sculpted into divine figures and elaborate motifs, the temple is impressive. When one enters, and sees that the working is even more thorough on the interior, one is simply stupefied and giddy. The ceilings “vault”, for lack of a better word, into designs of concentric circles, the circles made from angels and Gods and nature-based patterns, with the highest, central most point, as modern (realistic) looking idols of the Gods. Every pillar was elaborately decorated. I was left with the feeling that the temple didn’t really need any actual central murtis (idols)—that the walls and the pillars and ceiling sufficed. However, the central idol was about a 30 to 40 foot tall statue of Swami Narayan meditating, looking almost like a Buddha, golden hued (if not actually golden) and with 15 foot statues of the principal Swamis that were devoted to Swami Narayan flanking.
We retreated to the snack canteen and as I sipped a soda and ate ice cream, I excitedly said. “Wow, I don’t know if the Taj Mahal is actually more impressive than that or not. I think that might be the most amazing building I’ve ever seen.” Luckily, we were headed for the Taj the next night, so Jeff and Kim could form their own opinions.
I think that, after the fact, they were unprepared to place one site or the other as more stunning. I, myself, feeling unprepared to crutch up to the actual Taj Mahal after having already crutched through the large entrance gates, sat and watched darkness descend all around the monument. I remembered on what it was like seeing the Taj last month, and appreciated all its beauty from my comfortable (other than the dusk-time mosquitoes) position at the close side of the reflecting ponds. Kim was pleased with the site, a point I tried to get her to elaborate on since her original plans for seeing India in five days were: “Well… I’d like to see the Taj…” However, India was already bringing out her inner child too, as she began snapping at street hawkers and beggars along with me. “Do you want to come back in the morning, see the Taj in daylight?” I wanted to do whatever she wanted while she was here.
“No, I want to get out of this city. I hate it here.” Fair enough. The street hawkers really are something else.
Next stop: Keoladeo National Park—“India’s most famous bird sanctuary”; “one of the world’s most important” wetland sanctuaries. (a la Rough Guide to India) After the excitement of the morning safari last month in Ranthambhore National Park, I insisted that we fit in a park. Keoladeo, less out of the way that Ranthambhore in the trip from Agra to Jaipur, was the target I chose. We took quaint bicycle rickshaws a couple kilometers into the park and back, taking about two hours for the whole trip. It wasn’t the same as driving around the ruins of Ranthambhore, expecting tigers around each corner (and finding, at least, photogenic monkeys), however, we were greeted by the cutest baby owl at the front of the park, who stood out from its niche in a tree, looking around, doubtlessly wondering what we were doing awake in the middle of the day, such prime time for sleeping.
We did see antelopes, which I really appreciated. Our guides, operating the bicycle rickshaws, made point to name all the birds we spotted, really great—bird-watching for dummies. When we passed a cow, our guide detailed: “Cows… milk… milk!” Making the motion of milking a cow with his hands. I laughed and tried to communicate—“We have those in America, too.”
We saw all three types of Kingfisher that the park had, which was the highlight of the bird watching for me (and I think the others, too) and the guides insisted we were lucky to see all three. After seeing the first kind of Kingfisher, which was black-and-white spotted, I pulled out my water bottle and questioned the driver: “It doesn’t look like the beer company’s label.” (For anyone who has never traveled to India or gone to an Indian restaurant in the US that serves beer, Kingfisher is the big brand—they’ve branched out into bottled water, which is the brand I prefer in India, it’s good tasting water—goes down smooth. An important factor when a study from the nineties found that many brands of bottled water in India had unusual amounts of pesticides in them.) The guide related that colorful, tropical-looking bird on the beer can was actually another kind of Kingfisher, a blue Kingfisher, which we later saw, much to our amusement.
From there, we moved on the Jaipur. Kim came down with Delhi belly, so I was by her side in the late night and morning, futilely offering my Ayurvedic herbs and probiotic enzymes, the stuff that everyone I knew swore by to cure Delhi belly within a (painful) 24 hour period. There’s not much to say about Jaipur—it’s a whirlwind of shopping and modern amenities without the sprawl of Delhi. I have lots of pictures that I’ll include of that insanely amazing architecture of the Rajas of the area—we went to Amber Fort palace.
We also took an elephant ride, another experience that you can’t say much about, other than we were all, or at least Kim and I, sure that we would fall off if the elephant made any quick moves. I was comfortable that the elephant was well trained and wouldn’t—until, at least, a dog started barking from inside a house, the elephant looked to the side and began to turn and face the dog. The elephant conductor (there’s a beautiful Hindi word for this, but I think “elephant conductor” is funny enough to warrant my not looking up the Hindi…) smacked the elephant a few times, giving him orders, and I just really prayed that the dog would shut up or that the elephant would be considerate of the four humans who thought it would be a good idea to ride him. When we were let off the elephant (onto a wall, 6 feet high—a frightening experience when you have one good leg, and the other leg was broken two weeks prior from jumping off a 6-foot high wall) we were left without much to say to the elephant and his conductor, who lingered a moment. The elephant looked benignly, peacefully at us humans. I reached out to pet his trunk. The conductor neatly piled the trunk onto the wall for more in-depth petting, I obliged, though weary of elephant snot. The elephant seemed to pass some of his peace and love on through his snout, and I left energized, understanding why elephants are thought to be so holy.
The transformation into children fully completed, India having done her work, my sister and I fought like children the next day as the journey to Delhi began—though, in Kim’s defense, she had been suffering badly from Delhi belly before returning to the city of its namesake, whereas digesting the same things, after my bouts with sickness in Rishikesh, just gave me a terrible rumble for a couple days—I was functional. Our fight left me depressed straight through their trip back to the States and my own trip back down to Bangalore.

My yelling and cursing that day came with my pre-paid taxi driver in Bangalore, who abandoned me without getting my room finalized, and left me on crutches in the hilly ashram. The ashram staff informed me that they had no idea I was coming, despite calling and e-mailing ahead of time, and they couldn’t guarantee me free stay and a position in the ashram. They suggested I pay for stay there until things got sorted out. I grudgingly obliged, though I put them on a short list for people I planned to sooner or later be childish at. During these first days of stay, I quickly realized that staying at the ashram was not going to work out. Walking to the “near” side of the ashram took about 20 minutes of crutching up hills, and walking to the “far” side took more like 45 minutes, given that I needed at least two exhausted, sweaty, panting breaks. As much as possible, I refused to use the autorickshaw drivers at the ashram which stay there, like birds of prey, waiting for Westerners they can overcharge, swearing up and down that they have base rates which cause the prices to be high and that they’ll have to “Return empty”—loosing valuable time they could otherwise devote to their life’s aspiration of always having a full auto. Avoiding spending my fifty cents or a dollar on transporting myself comfortably around the ashram, I quickly wore out my arms and my willpower, and became all the more short with people.
My second day at the ashram was my birthday. I was mopey; thoughts filled my head of leaving the ashram that I had so much looked forward to coming to. I moped my way to the internet café, moped out a few sad e-mails, and decided that the man running the internet café would be the person who got yelled at that day. I crutched up to the canteen, downed a couple lassis (“the hard stuff”) and cried for an hour or two. I really needed to leave.
The next day I got a suitcase that I had left with a friend before going up north, and I got to do the long Sudarshan Kriya, which took a lot of the fire out of my mope. I spent the day gathering phone numbers—my plan was to do panchakarma, a series of Ayurvedic cleansing treatments, something I’d always wanted to try, but can only afford to do in India, and then maybe take some kind of meditation retreat to keep my off my feet and on my butt until I get the cast off—at least two more weeks as I write.
I am now in some other section of Bangalore in an Ayurvedic hospital, going through with the panchakarma plan. With my time, (I have a lot of time, I sit on my bed all day reading) I’ve almost finished transliterating a Sanskrit prayer and hence learning how to read Devanagri, the script used to write Sanskrit and north Indian languages like Hindi, a somewhat purposeless skill in southern India, where the scripts are Dravidian influenced, circular and dizzying. I’ve devoted myself pretty strongly to VS Naipaul’s Million Mutinies Now, which, despite its 500 plus pages, won’t last too long unless the doctors bring me that TV and DVD player they keep talking about. One really interesting part of the book I read yesterday—discussing the Naxalite movement from the first hand experience of the idealistic Socialists who started it, and how they became “a little dismayed” when it turned into a murderous terrorist movement. Great reading.
My first night at the hospital was highlighted by a holy war between the Rajajinagar Mosquitoes and myself. It was by far the worst mosquito melee I’ve encountered in India on this trip. I thought I had extinguished enough of them before going to sleep after midnight, but I woke with many an itchy spot and near constant buzzing in my ears at three in the morning. I dawned my longsword and summoned my will to fight. (My “longsword” at three in the morning are my pyjama bottoms.) About half an hour later, with many a foe encrusted into my longsword, I lay down my weapon, and return to sleep, hoping that turning the fan on would save me from further incidence.
At about half-past five, the heathens launched their counterattack. By quarter to five, I could not tolerate it any longer. Again, I switched on the lights, and I swore myself to battle. After another half hour, I resigned myself to early morning reading and began formulating the wordings of my complaint to the hospital staff. Four hours later, when their working day was beginning full swing, I told the doctors of the holy war.
“Yes, but this is India, mosquitoes are ev…”
“I’ve been in India for three months. No matter Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Jaipur, Rishikesh, the absolute worst was last night.”
“Well, we can get you a coil.” Not a coil in the traditional sense, a contraption that heats up DEET and puts it into the air in a gaseous form.
“I don’t like those. They’re poisonous.”
“Well…”
“They’re poisonous.”
“It’s like this, do you drink Coke?” “No.”
“When you drink Coke, you take in all the chem…”
“I don’t drink Coke, I don’t touch the stuff. Maybe you do, and that’s fine with me, but I…” The doctor, with the DEET-to-Cola analogy, clearly wanted to win the position of the person who I would yell at.
“No, I don’t drink Coke, but…”
“I want a screen on the windows, or I will find another hospital.” I was fresh out of ideas for something more childish to say.
After a call with the doctor who ran the hospital this doctor, who I refered to later in the day as “the Stupid One,” for lack of knowing his name, came back in the room and said that they would get a screen and that the doctor who ran the hospital would be in to see me in a few hours, and he told me which treatments we would start.
The day passed, and I got my first treatment, a much-needed Shirodhara—bathing of the forehead with a stream of warm oil—one of my favorites, and a treatment Ayurveda is famous for. I was much more relaxed and content but not ready to show my weak side until I got a screen in my window and a good night’s sleep. The day passed on, as evening approached, I paged the attendants—“Where are the screens?”
The attendant in broken English, “Not possible. All stores close.”
Frustrated, I asked for the doctor, which is becoming my way of asking for someone who speaks English. The Stupid One came.
“Yes, we can’t get the screens, the stores are all closed, an actor is passing…”
An actor is passing? I had begun to understand that in India, everything closes for seemingly archaic holidays. I had begun to understand that the cinema is a powerful cultural force here, as anywhere. But closing stores because an actor passes through? “I don’t care if an actor is passing!”
“You may not care but…”
“I need these windows to be sealed or I can’t stay here!” I had already related to him earlier that after another night of broken sleep, I would really be impossible to deal with. At some point someone had stressed to me that people were violent outside. I was confused and assumed they were misplacing more appropriate descriptors.
We eventually stuffed blankets in part of the windows that don’t close by design, and I performed an elaborate ritual to the ceiling fan, hoping it would keep me cool in my sealed bunker. The next day, I began my regimen of herbs—I was to tell how well my body absorbed the herbs by the taste of my burps. Two doctors told me this, just to be sure. I was given a print out of instructions about the procedure. The instructions stressed that I was to withdraw my senses and not to over-stimulate the sense organs. I obliged and spent the early part of the day picking off dead skin from my feet and cuddling up with VS Naipaul in the most socially acceptable of ways.
A “band” on the closest street corner played Filmy music and the soundtrack of Bollywood films throughout the day as I was attempting to not over-stimulate my sense organs. A “band” is the popular Indian gadget of an amplifier with many low quality but powerful speakers, built into a cart that, in the end, doesn’t look dissimilar to a decorated ice cream wallah. Seeing this gadget get wheeled down the street, a portable soapbox or an instant leader of a processional, exemplifies how over-crowded and noisy Indian cities are; exemplifies how hard it is for an individual to be heard or noticed. Periodically, large groups of people would drive by hollering and cheering. Through my aggravation, I eventually decided to get myself out of bed and look at the goings-on in the streets.
Maybe 7 or 8 men sat idly by the band that was placed on the street corner. There was a garlanded photo, though I couldn’t make it out, I assumed it was some obscure God or deified historical figure of India. The streets were sparse, all the shops obviously closed for a second day. I thought of how insane Indians were to make so much noise with these bands that only a few people would actually want to hear—it seems like a simple and feeble expression of pride, the desire to make ones own cause foremost in everyone’s attention, whether they felt the same or not.
Occasionally, a chain of five to a dozen motorcycles would drive by, and men would cheer to the men standing near the band. The men wore bright yellow and red bandanas, or placed them on the motorcycles, and I soon noticed that there was a large yellow and red flag above the band. I assumed it was connected with some political group and that all this was somehow related to the “passing actor” of the day before.
After getting my Shirodhara that evening, the Stupid One was telling me about how all the shops were still closed. I asked him about the flag. “Yes, that’s all it.”
“All for an actor who came through?”
“He was a very famous actor.” Somehow I started to get the point. “He died?”
“Yes, he passed.”
“Oh, I thought you were trying to tell me he was passing through the area yesterday.”
“Yes, the body.”
It was starting to make a little sense. “It’s very hectic outside. People get beaten up, shops are getting stoned, 60 cars and busses and stores have been burned.”
“Burned?”
“Yes, 60 cars and busses. Do you read the English news?”
I hadn’t come across a paper. He gave me the popular English newspaper in Karnataka state, the Vijaya Times. The front page was completely on the death of the actor. Actually, so was the second page, and three-quarters of the third page. Much of the fifth and seventh pages were also on the actor. The newspaper was less than 20 pages altogether, about a third of the day’s post was on the event in Bangalore.
The actor, RajKumar had been largely responsible for bringing the Indian film industry to Karnataka state and popularizing films in the state language, Kannada. The front page has a quote from India’s Prime Minister and an article about the condolences of India’s President and Karnataka state’s Chief Minister. Actors are quoted saying that RajKumar was the greatest personality ever known to Karnataka and that those left behind in the film business were now but orphans.
RajKumar had also sparked public concern seven years ago, when leaders of the Sandalwood black market kidnapped him. During the 180-some days that he was held captive, the public began to hold observances and special pujas. The film industry in Karnataka vowed to stop working on films until he was returned. The governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were involved in negotiations for his return.
Now, with his death, the government declared official observances on Wednesday and Thursday, April 12th and 13th. Businesses closed down, and frantic fans attacked those that remained open. The body was moved back and forth to multiple destinations so that fans could pay their respects and “receive the darshan” of their beloved star. Police resorted to using tear gas in some cases to control crowds. In fans frustrations, arson began in several areas of Bangalore, burning cars and busses, even police vehicles. Small scale rioting began. The government pleaded autorickshaw drivers to stop running, yet with many busses attacked, public transport was lacking, and many people became stranded at their places of work.
In this way—me wondering why the local street corner had a band playing Filmy music, wondering what the red and yellow flags were; I believe I just lived through my very first rioting city. All the while, cuddled up with Mr. Naipaul and retiring my sense organs.

Sacrilege and Sanctity 01-Apr-2006

2006-04-14T04:49:00.000-07:00

On the ride from Rishikesh today, I realized somewhere, maybe near the beginning of the Delhi sprawl, that, indeed, India is not any holier than the rest of the world. This is, in some ways, profound, and in a simple way, sacrilege.
I was reading V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now for most of the drive. The Indians that Naipaul interviews relate that India’s history has been one of remembering “which God did what” in a certain place, and he goes on to note that the same people couldn’t tell you (and wouldn’t care) who was ruling the area at any given point in time and who dispossessed them of their power.
Thus, India is a land that is entrenched with a religious history that talks at great length about the religious history of the land itself. The longer I stay in India, the less impressive it becomes to hear that one God or another “stood on this spot” and, say, disemboweled a being from the netherworlds.
One side effect of the religious-geographical history is that Hinduism, taken out of its motherland, is a fish out of water. Hinduism, once disabled of its patron Sacred Rivers, its complex social systems, and its monthly or semiannual pilgrimages, becomes reduced to a philosophical system, a yoga practice, or a set of dogmatic rites. (Rites that might embody more the sentiment of nostalgia or homesickness than the mood of religiosity.)
The second side effect is that anyone alien to this complex, ancient history is kept at a level of a superficial of a permanent tourist, in the trappings of the self-contradictory mythology that is Hinduism. With mouth wide open, the new comer ponders: “So, you say that Shiva, the God that doesn’t take incarnations was right here?”
The masters of India have done well in picking and choosing what of Hinduism they export to the West. Vivekananda brought philosophy. Yogananda brought meditation. Sri Bhaktivedanta Prabhupad (Hare Krishna) brought singing. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought meditative mantras. So many others have brought the yogic path Ayurveda, Jyotish or Vaastu Shastra. No one seems to explicitly say they are bringing Hinduism—in my book, the reason is simple: Hinduism is not for export.
I do not think that any non-Indian can fully convert to Hinduism. The nature of the mind of the convert is to be enchanted by some understanding that the new religion provides, yet, with Hinduism, any Indian will be quick to tell you—they don’t understand it themselves! The history of Hinduism is too rich, too complicated, too vague, and too confusing to give a perspective convert a feeling that he or she has been given understanding, or at least the understanding in the form of a great parsimony that erases doubts and confusions at their base.
With just a little insight at how this history has come to be, (through meticulous detailed conservation of events and through amazing amounts of elaboration of the same tales when told person-to-person) one could easily assume the most profound idea for Hinduism and for all the world’s religions—that this kind of elaborate, amazing sanctification has been taking place all over the world, for all time.
Just because we don’t have any scriptures saying that the Mississippi or the Amazon or the Colorado Rivers are forms of God that wash away sins, doesn’t mean that they are not. The Ganges, the Yamuna, the Krishna, or, further west, the Jordan all flow into the same oceans (which are, anyway, all directly connected with each other) and their added waters from their many tributaries don’t seem to dilute the sanctity of the holy rivers as you flow further and further downstream.
It may be a more universal form of Hinduism to accept that there have been thousands more saints than can be imagined. Just as one passes exceptionally holy spots on the quarter-hour while traveling through India, maybe this is also true of Minnesota, Norway, or Columbia. Whatever quality it is that makes the Hindu mind so ready to accept the possibility of such localized sanctity in India (even if it is also responsible for gullibility) could be cultivated around the world for globalized sanctity. We could all be left in wonder about how it might just be true that we all possess an infinite spirit and that this life is simply meant for the cultivation of that spirit. “Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky.”
Much of these thoughts came about, coupled with a release at the kind of subtle cultural superiority that many Hindus seem to carry about. Especially living in India, I am often confronted with these sentiments that “India is the Holy Land” and that Indians are somehow more pure or innocent than “foreigners.” Racial superiority or inferiority aside, as I carried this desire to see the many pilgrimage spots of India in the short time I have here, and continued to be only frustrated by having a broken ankle, I realized: It’s simply not true. “The gateway to heaven isn’t Benares.” The gateway to heaven is everywhere—whereas it isn’t true to say that “Benares isn’t the gateway to heaven”, it’s also not true to say that “the gateway to heaven is exclusively Benares.” (This last part is so often the popular Hindu belief.) More important than any sacrilege to Hindus or Hinduism is the acceptance that everywhere is holy.
This all is also not to devalue the contributions of the ancient Indian sciences, which do seem to hold up to an experiential test. Many of the beliefs that are so tied in with Hinduism with their sources from ancient Sages and the Vedas are parts of a meticulously detailed science of raising consciousness and opening the heart.
I feel that one of the most pervasive illusions of Westerners who come to the path of yoga and of Indians when they evaluate the Western world is the belief that India is the holy land and Indians the chosen people (a hand-down from the caste system post-modern-corruption?) and people outside India are somehow tainted and their lands less sanctified. This belief undermines the tenet of yogic philosophy that it is a natural tendency of spirits to move toward raising consciousness. By this, I mean that yogic philosophy professes that there is something eternal and in all places the same—a basic “core spirituality” or universal human values. To say that Hindus are more in touch with this is to take away its very universality.
Hindus (and yogis) are, perhaps, more in touch with the form of those values take inside their culture, but they are also, like all people, attached to the form those values take, and sensitive to when that form is not maintained—i.e. representations of sexuality, respect for specific social roles and relationships, behavior around food or temples. Hindus are sensitive to their own dogma and they label that as “core spirituality.”
Just in my own life, I know that I have a different way of perceiving those values, and the form they take in my life might be watching Six Feet Under or listening to folk songs or bopping my head to Lauryn Hill. My spiritual values have a lot to do with what I try to understand about others and social conditions and what I try to help others see of my own vision. This is a good stepping-stone for understanding how any other Westerner accesses universal values in ways that might not be recognized by the highly orthodox.
No one intentionally, fully knowingly, lives an inauthentic life or chases things that they know not to be conducive to happiness. The search for happiness is synonymous with the conscious search to expand oneself because becoming happy is, in a subtle but sure way, expanding out from that contracted sense of Self. Every “teeny-bopper” listens to their pop music because they feel it conveys something about life, something about joie-de-vivre that was not previously displayed. Every drug addict in the world is looking for deliverance from their mistakes and from the pains of life, and every one will be able to tell you about someone who is less moral than they are, and will be able to draw the distinction that they are “not like that”, and are really more positive. Even when the intellect is wrapped in nihilism and atheism, its basic search is for truth, and the main debate put up by such a person would be to say that it’s pointless to waste precious time in life and it’s not needed to be self-abnegating. These same points, when said by a holy man become deep spiritual truths, but they are so often discarded and labeled as bitterness when they come from a common person. It may be a critical step to recognize that there are no common people; every soul is one that contains truths—wisdom gathered from living life from that perspective.
In giving this a fair analysis, I have also arrived at an important question—What, then, are the dogmas of the Western way of perceiving universal truth? What are the places in our search for truth where we are simply caught up in the form?

Free Publicity

2006-03-28T03:24:00.000-08:00

So, I’m guessing that if I’ve posted this second new writing, I’ve posted the new photos from Holi… anyhow, life has been fun here. To my surprise one night, as I came home, I thought I heard familiar voices in our awesome guest house, the Welcome Center, I peaked to the table where the voices were coming from, and seeing no one familiar, I shrugged my shoulders and said to my friend, “Nope, I guess no familiar voices…” Before I could walk away, the New York accent that seemed so familiar to me said, “Hey, how are you?” Whether or not I’d met them, good ole Americans are always familiar in India.

Regardless, the guys were very amiable, and we got to talking. By and by Soami Das (the owner of the guest house) sat down with us and we had some good conversations. I admit, it was largely an “us guys” vibe, but I was more than okay with it, as I set in to doodle on my cast (will send a picture later).

The other guys who were visiting the Welcome Center started to drop a bit of information about Darren (one of the two guys) being a director, so I asked what films he’d done. Anyhow, long story not-so-short, it was Darren Aronofsky, director of “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”—two really great movies. (i.e. my response was a sobered: “Those are damned good movies.”) Anyway, Alan Ball still takes my heart completely, but Darren Aronofsky, I would stretch to say, is one of the best directors out there right now. Free publicity: He said this fall’s movie, his third big one, is his best yet, and is called “The Fountain”—Who wants to go see it with me??? In one moment of our conversation when Soami Das mentioned how Brad Pitt was just in Rishikesh, Darren basically said how it was all BS. I asked, “You don’t believe it?” “Well, I texted him and he said he was in France.” I couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg. Daniel, his friend, a hair stylist for musicians and actors and such, laughed and said, “If Brad Pitt was in Rishikesh, he didn’t know it.” And I kind of scratched my head, feeling, like I have so many times on this trip, that the world was a bit smaller than I ever had imagined.

So that was one fun experience… I’ve been taking classes with a cool guy named Palla at the Welcome Center, and he teaches something called Body Love Stretching, which is sort of like a cousin of Osteopathy… yesterday especially, I literally rolled out of bed and into class… can’t beat that, and classes are about $2-3 for two hours, which sure beats Osteopathy in the States: $100 / hour, easily.

Hanging out with my buddy Atma, the merchant I know in town who has been able to organize so much sanity into my otherwise insane ventures, he asked kind of out of the blue if I wanted to go to Vrindavan (Brindaban, any variation therein) the place where Krishna grew up. Throwing my all to spontaneity, I said I’d love to, not really trusting he was 100% for real… none the less, within 24 hours, we were in Vrindavan…

William Dalrymple wrote one of the opening chapters of Age of Kali on the city, calling it the City of Widows, since all the Vaishnava (Krishna devotees) widows head to that city when their husbands die. In Hindu society, a widow loses all her status and wealth when her husband dies, left with nothing but the gold she wore when she was married and the bangles on her wrists. These women, often falling from the top of society to the bottom, solemnly take Krishna as their formless lover and their only comfort in life. In the Krishna temples of Vrindavan, many of these widows are “employed”—they chant songs to Krishna for 8-hour shifts in return for a handful of rice. Many of the temple pundits are said to be corrupt, running the poorly maintained temples simply as a means to take the donations, and doing nothing to aid these widows.

I had read all this before coming to Vrindavan, so, to see how amazingly normal the city seemed was actually quite a shock. Knowing that the city was teeming with social problems, yet looking around, it seemed like all the other cities of India I’ve come to know. Walking up to one of Radha and Krishna’s gardens, there was a strip of 20 or 30 beggars outside, pleeing for alms. Going the jungled maze of side streets to another garden we passed several elderly women who were malnourished and had shaven heads. These were the only signs of the poverty of Vrindavan that seemed to depend upon the generosity of pilgrims, the only reminder that Vrindavan was, to some extent, known for this.

Thinking about it now, I may be desensitized to beggars who focus on pilgrims because I’ve been in Rishikesh for a month and the pot-smoking saddhus and destitute widows live similarly here, begging from the international tourists who come for Rishikesh’s ashrams and yoga centers.

Protected, somewhat, by my upper class friend and guide, we ran through Krishna’s gardens on a special holiday in Vrindavan (which was very tiring crutching my way through and trying to keep up) and saw a couple more temples before checking in. One garden had a bedroom that was used by Radha and Krishna—every night (I was unclear whether this happened every night or just on the specific day of the year that people celebrated while we were there) the pundits would leave the room neatly arranged and lock up the gardens. Yet, every morning, Radha and Krishna would make love on the bed, leaving it a terrible mess. The windows that face this garden must all be boarded so that no one sees all of this, and locals swear that the monkeys aren’t the perpetrators, since they all leave the gardens and go to sleep. It is said that people who have hidden in the garden to try to catch a glimpse of these miracles are struck deaf or dumb or blind after that night. Regardless, it was a kind of cool place to feel, “Oh, I’m here, at this spot.”

In the morning we made it out to the new and pretty famous ISKCON / Hare Krishna temple of Vrindavan, and I got some surprisingly great shopping done before hopping back in the car and rolling back to Rishikesh. Don’t tell my Mom, but I bought some cow dung incense.

--- Photos near Neelkanth Temple

2006-03-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

Like I said in the blog, the best part of Neelkanth Temple was walking back. :) (except that whole breaking my ankle thing)
In the third and fifth pictures, that's Rishikesh in the valley below...

--- Holi Photos

2006-03-28T02:32:00.000-08:00

Casualty #577

2006-03-21T05:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Spencer expressed something to me exactly as I had thought—in India, it’s impossible to take a bad picture. It is, I would add, also impossible to capture an Indian moment inside a picture. As telling as it is to take a photo of a beggar or a street performer, I wish I could also capture a shot of the on-lookers with looks that range from reproach to indifference to a smooth interest in me—one in a million momentary tourists who come to India to have their lives shaped, yet leave little impression on the county herself.
Holi is the Spring festival of India. Though traditionally Hindu, one gets the feeling that no one withholds from the celebrations. Without even walking out of my guest house on Holi, I had to make haste to evade the desk clerk, who anxiously awaited his chance to be the first to smear me with the bright pigments that signify a new flowering in the spring time. I avoided Karuna, the woman who runs the kitchen in the guest house next door where I ate my breakfast, knowing that her perseverance in smearing me with colors would outlast my playful, if stubborn, resistance. A friend asked Karuna if the traditional smearing of pigments on people was a form of blessing on Holi, Karuna chuckled out a soft “Nooooo….”—a surprising answer in a land where everything seems to have some spiritual significance.
Then we actually made it out to the streets. Some older locals had warned many of the remaining Art of Living Westerners to basically make camp in our rooms and not to go outside at any cost. We were told to buy fruits, water, and crackers to last several days. Fearful stories of people getting their pants pulled down and all sorts of mayhem circulated. The universal idiom of Holi is, “Don’t wear your Sunday’s finest.” However, it is, of course, tradition to wear white.
The shops in Rishikesh were gated shut, an interesting scene in a town I had never seen slow down. From the alleyways and rooftops, and hiding around corners, people of all ages waited to douse passers-by with pigments and water balloons and follow these up with roaring laughter and an affectionate hug. Our plan had been to hike up the foothills to Neelkanth Temple, said to be a sacred site of one event or another in the endless history of Hinduism. Before getting to our meeting point, I was soaking wet in spots and had at least five distinct colors across my face and clothing. Doubt set in as to how sound our plans were.
Once meeting, we moved together as a group of six or seven for no more than 15 minutes before the chaotic bombardment of water balloons split our group up. Still with two friends, we bought seats in a ten-seater (though the name may be deceiving, it’s actually a normal Jeep) and took a sleepy, scarry, and, for my friends, nauseating trip one hour into the Himalayan foothills. The temple itself was almost completely not noteworthy.
I bought a “Puja thali” from the vendors outside, (an arrangement of traditional offerings) and, entering the temple, a priest mechanically told me how to offer each item. Feeling somewhat uninspired at the end of the two or three minute offertory, I asked if I could chant y own puja. Receiving the Indian head nod, I started into a Shiva puja, not two minutes into the prayers, the priest tapped me on the shoulder and urged me onward—the next pilgrim had come with his thali. None of us speaking Hindi or really knowing what this temple was dedicated to, we bounced through the few rooms, doing our best to take the prasadam and darshans of whatever it was the temple had to offer, and we retired to a room that seemed forgotten by the other devotees so that we could meditate.
As we navigated our way out of the complex, we passed a horrible scene of a bunch of insensitive Indian men joking and celebrating around a terrified monkey that they had chained by the throat. The monkey shrieked and pushed violently to get away from the men who really seemed to be getting a great joy out of it. My blood boiled. I was of course ready to smack the men, but thought that I might be just a little more acceptable to the conservative Hindu society if I left nonviolently. Even as I write this I question what I really should have done. “It seems so ridiculous to start an animal rights project in India,” I reflected with one of my friends while we walked away, “when so much needs to be done with human rights here.”
Leaving the temple was really the best part. Escaping the hillsides of trash and debris which surround any “civilized” part of India, the refuse does relent to breathtaking views of surrounding valleys and foothills. The walk back to Rishikesh is a three- or four-hour walk at a strolling pace; as paths wind back and forth to go either up or down a hillside, the distance must be at least double or triple the distance that the bird flies.
As we reached the bottom of the foothills and came within a kilometer or two of the Swargashram section of the city, we chanced upon a path that took us to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Maharishi’s ashram has been closed for many years, supposedly due to some tax problems, and is now under the possession of the national parks, though no one is allowed admission (at least not unless they bribe the self-appointed guard of the ashram.) This is the ashram that was home to Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation retreats in the late 60s, and saw visits from the Beach Boys and Mia Farrow and, most famously, the Beatles (a sign by a local café points up the hill and reads “Beatles’ Ashram, 100m.”)
Many of Art of Living’s earliest American teachers were originally involveds with Maharishi’s TM movement. HH Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, our affectionate “Guruji” in the Art of Living was in charge of many of Maharishi’s affairs from a young age. Even the meditation technique espoused by the Art of Living, Sahaj Samadhi Meditation, is likened to a powerful (and less expensive) version of Transcendental Meditation. For the Art of Living Westerner in Rishikesh, Maharishi’s ashram is one of the most exciting spots of pilgrimage—many of us had been buzzing about attempts at getting through the gates or past the guard.
Entering on our accidental path through the back gate, we only had to step over a three foot tall broken down wall to enter. The ashram is beautiful. It is a real travesty that the government will no longer sell the ashram to anyone. The visitor is left with the impression that this is the most recent of India’s priceless and only partially forgotten ruins. Vines growing up the sides of beautiful halls and kutirs, fallen trees across paths and once stunning brick walkways that are giving way to the grasses growing in their gaps beckon one to think of the days when month-long meditation retreats pushed the participants’ limits of four and five and six hours of Transcendental Meditation a day. Why couldn’t John and Paul’s patron “Fool on the Hill” have paid his taxes?
The front entrance to Maharishis’ ashram, which we made way to exit through, was, to my dismay, much better maintained. My friends headed for the hole in the gate, getting ready to slip through, and I looked at that askance and thought, “No way am I stuffing my ass through that.” I gave my friends my bags and said I would jump over the wall. To save further explanation, I didn’t land well. A humble crack and a numb sensation, not ready to take in the pain, were all I really noticed.
I pushed my weight onto my left leg and tried to sit down gracefully, as one of my friends yelled, “Just sit down!” I hobbled over to a café once I thought I could get up, we had been planning on having our dinner. However, as I pushed myself along using the ball of my right heel, I thought to myself how common it is in my family to not go to the doctor when we actually very much need to. “Umm,” I interrupted nervously as we neared the café gates, “I think I should probably suck up my pride and go to the hospital.”
“For real?”
“Umm… yeah…”
“Well, let’s sit down and see how you feel, then we can arrange everything.”
Sitting down (the picture of me all Holi-ed out is taken right at this moment) I actually started to feel all the pain that had been numb to me before. Tears of pain and frustration began to well up. “I should get going now…” We got a motorcycle to take me to the taxi stand, and an autorickshaw brought me to the (ominously named, if you are as skeptical as I am) Government Hospital. With my pronounced limp, I walked by more than one idle person and wheel chair and plopped myself down in the emergency room, the pain again flooding to my attention.
“What you need?” “I sprained my ankle…” Trying not to scream.
“So, what you need?” “I need an X-Ray, I need a leg brace, I need to see a doctor.”
“Oh, X-Ray not possible, today is Sunday.” It was Wednesday. “Take off,” pointing to my sock, “Let me see.”
I pealed off my sock, soaking wet from the melted ice (from the café.) And showed them my bloated, dead looking ankle.
“Hanh, Swollen.” The doctor wrote me a prescription for what turned out to be anti-inflammatory and pain-killer.
“I need and X-Ray.”
“X-Ray not possibly, today Sunday.”
“The guy’s not here?” I gestured in circles, frustrated and still on the verge of tears.
“Guy not here. Come back tomorrow. X-Ray I can’t do, but anteshtetic, I can do, here.” Handing me the paper.
“Okay, okay, I need a brace. Hard brace for my ankle.”
A blank expression. “A brace—like a cast, stop the movement in my ankle.”
“No. Cast comes after X-Ray, tomorrow.”
I tried to draw a picture of an ankle brace.
“Ah. Use bandage. I’ll write prescription.”
He added an ace bandage to the “prescription” and I walked out of the clinic, too infuriated to actually ask for the wheel chair, but in far too much pain to really resist the flow of events. Buying the drugs and bandage from the Chemist across the street, I took an autorickshaw to the ashram. Putting myself back in the hands of Art of Living was a great move. Before even walking to Guruji’s kutir, I was intercepted by a friend from the States. “What happened to you?”
Now the tears were more ready to flow. “I sprained my ankle at Maharishi’s ashram.”
“You shouldn’t be walking around! Come, sit!”
Without too much desire to defend my actions and the flow of events, I kind of collapsed into the care of friends. Within a few minutes a Swami was giving me a healing blessing, an ayurvedic (traditional Indian herbal) doctor was looking at my ankle and using marma (acupressure) points and a car was being arranged to take me to have my ankle X-Rayed and treated.
We went to a walk in X-Ray clinic and walked out with two X-Rays in less than fifteen minutes and for less that $4. The Osteopath at a local ashram hospital was called in at eight or nine PM on a holiday night for consultation, and a half-caste (to allow for swelling) was put on my leg. The official word: I have a fractured tibia, right at the ankle where it comes in medially. The piece of bone is disconnected, so they want to check on it after a week before putting on the permanent cast. I am Casualty #577 at Nirmal Ashram Hospital, or so says my perscription to take anti-inflammatories, elevate my foot, and keep wiggling my toes.
Anyway, total service. Life is now a bit different. I spend most of my days sitting at a local guesthouse, reading, relaxing, and listening to music. I’ve been able to get much more into the text part of my study here, which is good, breaks up the flow of meditation courses I’d been on and the anticipated volunteer work I’ll be doing in Bangalore. As I’ve commiserated with friends, there’s a big part of me that is just screaming, “I want my Mommy!” and I’ve been somewhat filled with doubts, thinking maybe it is time to head back to the States and that being temporarily handicapped in India will be completely unbearable.
I notice that so much of my security, so much of my sense of being taken care of as I travel is actually a sense of being able to take care of myself. Now, I find that I must have a more fundamental security and work through the uncomfortable notion of not knowing where help will come from. Day by day I watch friends leave Rishikesh and I see them off with uneasy smiles, silently thinking, “How the hell am I going to get by?” I suppose that everyone is used to being able to care for themselves, but it’s a matter of opening up and just stating whatever it is that I need, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me to ask for it. Cognitively, I know I can’t jump up and do a small chore when I feel restless, and I can’t make up for rough communications or relationships with people by walking out and buying them something, or taking care of their material needs myself. What I mean to say is that I realize, on some level, that I am used to being able to be these external things, sometimes even as a way to ignore or distract from the (in Eastern thought, “All-important”) mental or emotional states I may be experiencing. As I reflected with a friend the other day as dusk set in on our guesthouse, “I am left with this question, ‘Who am I when I am not my actions?” And in some way, my life has become that of an observer. So I wait and wait for my leg to heal.
I have gone out and done one amazingly interesting thing in the past few days. Yesterday I had my astrological charts made and analyzed for the first time. The Indian science of Jyotish incorporates (and predates) what we normally think of as Astrology and Palmistry in the West but it also borders with energy work, Ayurveda (the aforementioned Indian science of health), and Vastu Shastra, the Indian predecessor to Feng Shui. Jyotish is, to say the least, pervasive in India. In the closure to John Keay’s Into India, which I finished reading last night, Keay calls Jyotish “That most Indian of sciences,” and refers to its endless refusal to be understood or simplified. Jyotish is referred to for ever moderately significant business decisions, life-problems, and, probably most famously, for marriages—arranged or otherwise.
A merchant who has befriended most of the Art of Living Westerners who passed through Rishikesh, not excluding myself, took me to the Jyotish. It was his long time friend’s home—a small ashram and school where boys are adopted from villages in the surrounding areas to be given a chance at succeeding in modern city life. We sat down in a beautiful living room in her home in the ashram, and she called for someone to bring chai as we waited for Uncle to come down. (Most elderly and respected men in India are called “Uncle” by almost everyone who meets them. This, at least, makes remembering their name easier.) The experience was wonderful. We informally talked about my charts, and, to my wonder, Uncle would burst out with a long talk about something in Hindi, seemingly a revelation, and, in time, one of my friends would give a simplified English version of whatever Uncle had said. It was mostly a time for me to reflect on myself and my life, however, it was also an amazing peak into part of India that I had not yet tried to learn. I left dizzy with knowledge and very excited about what I’d learned. That night I opened a book on Jyotish written for Westerner’s to check one thing that the Jyotish had mentioned, and I realized how amazingly complex the science really was. Inundated with Sanskrit terms I’d never caught wind of before, I shut the book, glad for how simplified my introduction had been.
Today I began to read V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinees Now. I am pressing onward in my attempts to try to understand Indian society and social groups. My original goal was to analyze spiritual communities in India, yet from the outset I seemed to recognize that what I needed to come to terms with most was the society itself. When so much of India is foreign to the visitor, even acquiring the barebones understanding that I currently have has been dizzying. Though I do like all the books I’ve read thus far, Naipaul’s book promises to be more comprehensive than Dalrymple’s Age of Kali, or MacDonald’s Holy Cow (and more serious than the later) and, at least, more up-to-date than John Keay’s (1973) Into India. Also, as I remarked proudly to a friend over breakfast today, “Yep, this is serious… this is the first book that doesn’t have a map of India in it.” I smiled widely, “You know, because they trust that you know where everything is…”

Intro to the blog!!!!!

2006-03-14T03:08:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone!

Great news! After three days of hard work, I have pulled together the blog! So, I’ll try to e-mail everyone whenever I post, but if you get really hooked, you can always check the blog a http://seaninindia.blogspot.com (“Sean In India”) I think blogspot.com is interchangable with blogger.com, if that makes it easier for you to remember….

About the blog: I’ve reposted all the original e-mails, chronologically, so the stuff you’ve read if you’ve been getting those e-mails is waaaaay at the bottom, however, there’s something like four new writings that I’ve done while I traveled that are posted on the blog, also chronological, oldest stuff at the bottom…

This post, though it’s an intro to the blog, will be at the top when you come to the page, so it will be easy to spot when you first come to the blog…

Anyhow, I’m in Rishikesh right now (lots of info on that in the last two blog posts)… I’ve been in India just under 2 months, which puts me just over the “1/3” mark for my total trip. I’ve been facing a little homesickness, but I try to balance that with staying in wonder about what my trip will bring.

Guruji has given the official okay for me to do volunteer work in the Bangalore Ashram, so that’s my destination after my sister’s visit, and until she comes, I may head up to Dharamsala after Holi (Springtime Holiday) and maybe see the Dalai Lama.

In a way, my trip thus far seems to have been of three parts:

1- Relaxing in Gujarat and acclimating to India

2- The insane busy days of silver jubilee and receiving everyone in Bangalore and then hauling up for the rushed tour of Jaipur and Agra before Shivaratri, all laced with cultural celebrations and friends from around the world

3- The past two weeks of intensive meditations as I took courses in Rishikesh…

Anyhow, that’s all the cool, calm reflection I’m getting thus far! Jai guru dev!

Ha ha- small update... yesterday we (myself and four buddies) went rafting down the Ganges-- my first rafting trip ever, to boot! We had an amazing stop at a cave where Sage Vasishta, the ancient sage that bestowed knowledge and enlightenment to Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu, 10,000 years ago (by Hindu calendars, western historians, *of course* disagree) We did some prayers inside and the moment we stepped out of the cave, rain came pouring down on us, an excellent excuse to just let go and jump in the river. It was surprising not-shockingly-cold water and a wonderful trip all around! We had an excellent tour guide who totally fell in love with our enthusiasm... Broke my glasses because I was holding them in my hand as I dunked in the Ganges (which was simultaneous with me clenching my fist :) ) getting two new pairs of glasses today from an optometrist in central rishikesh... extravagant you say? About US $30, I say! (For the trip and the glasses!)
Guruji is back in town today and the wild Spring time holiday, Holi, the festival of colors, will set in as soon as the rain blows past the city, and we'll be celebrating for about two days :)

--- Rishikesh Photos of Sri Sri

2006-03-14T03:03:00.000-08:00

Worth a thousand words... :) The last photo is that 102 year old Swamiji I mentioned...

--- Rishikesh Pictures

2006-03-14T02:54:00.000-08:00

This first one is at a Rickshaw stand where tourists come and go for shopping at the popular Sivananda Nagar and Swargashram areas of the town that consist of the ashrams and dozens of stores angled towards "spiritual shoppers"
The second one is one of the ashrams we stayed at during the healing course, then we of course have some photos of the Ganges and finally, two monkeys hanging out on the bridge over the ganges between those shopping area I was just talking about...

"Hari Om!" (Rishikesh), 11th Mar 2006

2006-03-14T02:48:00.000-08:00

Geography lesson before we start: A step away from the “Golden Triangle” of tourism that is Delhi-Agra-Jaipur, Rishikesh is about as far North of Delhi as Agra is Southeast or Jaipur is Southwest. 226 Kilometers, to be exact, and the ride is about 6 hours on Indian roads, which get worse the further you go towards Rishikesh and the Himalayas. Rishikesh is at the foothills of the Himalayas, where the lower-lands receive the sacred river Ganges (more properly: “the sacred river Ganga”) from its mouth high in the Himalayas, 250 kilometers North. Rishikesh is in the state Uttaranchal, which was cut off from neighboring Uttar Pradesh because the two states, when united, were simply too big. North of Uttaranchal is China, Westward lies the Punjab and the other Himalayan states of India, Eastward lies Nepal. Rishikesh is a home base (so says Rough Guide to India) for pilgrimages into the sacred mountains above, which leads me to:

Religious/Cultural lesson before we start: The Ganges is said to be the body of a goddess who was trapped in Shiva’s dreadlocks. There’s a great quote in EM Forrester’s Passage to India (though I’m directly referring to the movie, not the book): “If, at any point, a man should so much as picture the River Ganges in his mind, he will attain liberation.” (Paraphrased by memory, of course) So, anyway, the Ganges is the holiest river of India, though the Yamuna and the Krishna are “trying their best”—actually, when visiting the Taj Mahal, I was as much enthralled by my first site of the Yamuna River as I was by chasing down the details of the architecture. Dunking in the Ganges is said to purify the soul in much the same way that pilgrims come for “baptism” in the River Jordan.

After the wonderful party of Mahashivaratri, I head on a bus up to Rishikesh. Enclosed is a great photo I got from a restaurant that gave me a mean case of Delhi Belly. Actually, since arriving in Rishikesh, about ten or eleven days now, I’ve had Delhi Belly (food poisoning from water, unclean or uncooked food) twice! After we arrived in Rishikesh (in the middle of the night due to the bus breaking down) and were rushed across the bridge; during our little microcosm of housing and registration and confusion, nausea set in and I proceeded to be lazy and a little cranky. For the next twenty four hours, I had the amazing gas pains that I knew were Delhi Belly from my experiences on my first trip to Bangalore a few years ago, so I knew to take care of myself right away (Oh yeah, don’t eat the Pizza Hut in Bangalore :) ) Anyway, the culprit was, I think, some undercooked vegetables at the rest stop our bus to Rishikesh took.

I was really excited to be in Rishikesh, having heard so much about Maharishi’s work with Transcendental Meditation here, hearing stories of Sri Sri taking dunks in the Ganges with devotees and, of course, because the Beatles came here and wrote a lot of the White Album in Rishikesh. :) “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play? Dear Prudence, it’s a brand new day—Look around!”

My first impressions were that Rishikesh was what I had first come to India looking for—holy men commonly on the streets, temples and sacred sights everywhere, spiritual shops that play mantras and devotional chants on the streets until late night. Despite by bellyache, an enthusiastic buzz set in very quickly. To my delight, rumors materialized that the meditation course we came to Rishikesh for really was to be the “Blessings Course”—an Art of Living course that was designed to prepare participants to be initiated into a healing technique. The Blessings Course was first given to the most senior teachers in Art of Living and Guruji’s Swamis after the tsunami because Guruji noticed that people were too traumatized to be able to release their stress through meditation and their were too many people traumatized for Guruji to give one on one darshan (blessing) to. So, the first healers were made, and since then, the Blessings course has happened many times around the world, making more and more people conduits of that level of grace, yet, I was always busy with volunteer work or taking other courses when the Blessings Course was held in the US or Canada, so I just had the experience of seeing how bright and blissful course participants looked as they went through the processes.

The fact that I got to take the course was amazing for me, and the processes themselves were beyond this world. I had many experiences of my heart opening up, stress disappearing, and really seeing how much we are all extensions of one energy, one love.

(Lots of Pictures attached:)

After the second meditation, Guruji came to our hall and we got to walk out to the Ganges with Him. Guruji sat on the steps of the ghat and talked with a Swamiji I hadn’t noticed before. I eventually decided it was worthwhile to give up my seat on the steps behind Guruji and walk through the sidewaters of the Ganges and get some good photos of Guruji from the front. Walking down there in front of Guruji, when most people had long been settled into their spots, I felt so shy, but also very ecstatic to be with the Guru at the banks of the Ganges. I took a few snaps of Him talking and sat down on a rock that some of my friends were sitting on. He looked my way lovingly, and I burst into a bashful smile. Guruji started to meditate after He had finished speaking with the Swami. Eventually He opened His eyes and started to walk into the Ganges. I did my best to quickly skip across the river stones to follow him and get some more good snaps, but walking on the slippery moss-covered stones, all at random angles, was a little challenging. I sure enough was in a great spot to take some pictures as Guruji started splashing everyone with the holy waters.

One brave Asian woman came up to Guruji, though she was complaining of the cold of the water, she faithfully dunked herself in the Ganges and Guruji looked to her so lovingly, definitely passing her a hefty blessing. Lots of people started preparing to do the same, and I thought about how wonderful it would be to have my first dunks in the Ganges be with Guruji sharing the waters with me. I luckily found someone who would hold my camera and I quickly maneuvered my way to near the front of the Guru and downstream from Him and joined the myriad of people who were now anxiously dunking themselves in the river. Each time I came up I looked to Guruji, who was looking at everyone, so happy, so in love with us all. Right after my third dunk (three is one of the traditional number of dunks for washing away your sins in the Ganges) everyone started trying to convince Guruji to dunk. We were all told to spread out, and I, being directly downstream was asked to move far back so that Guruji could swim downstream. All of us went down together with the Guru, (the Guru’s grace is said to flow through any waters you are sharing with the Guru) and He came up just a few inches away from me—all of us laughing and hollering. He quickly went for a second dunk and I floated downstream as we all dunked and He swam forward staying constantly just a few inches from me. We came again, still laughing all the more and completely ecstatic and blissful and pure and innocent. It was probably the closest I have ever felt to Him, so much in love, and so much simplicity—no roles of student and teacher or any sort of identities of separation.

Guruji started to move to the shore, everyone now in a strong mood of celebration. He changed into a dry dhoti and shawl as a few of the senior teacher held up a curtain for Him to change behind and hollered, “All ladies move on, He’s changing!”

We all collected our things from the banks of the river and skipped along to the Satsang hall, dripping all the way. One of the Westerners in Rishikesh who was a by-stander as all of the blissful (and cold and wet) Art of Living devotees passed saw a particularly “dunked” person who was walking just ahead of me and gave an approving “Alright!” And I was filled with a sense of a strange universality of the experience of falling in a senseless devotion to a Guru.

Arriving there, I wrapped up in a blanket from my kutir. Guruji burst into the knowledge right away, talking about the four things that keep us from experiencing the cosmic energies. The first was progeny—constantly worrying about one’s children and how they are doing. Next came wealth, spending one’s whole life worrying about money. Then was public opinion and respect, and finally worrying about “I, me.” Guruji said the one cure for all these four was to see that “I am dying right now,” every moment.

After he left, we had a beautiful satsang, everyone still so blissed out and joyous after our experience with the Guru in the Ganges. One teacher actually interrupted the Satsang to say that for her, it was a perfect reflection of the playful and undying love of Krishna and the Gopis, a thought that had crossed my mind too. I was touched when she said, “We were so blessed to just see that kind of love and playfulness, let alone those who were actually in the water with Him!” And I melted into the thought of being not only at a blessed occasion, but also in a blessed place in that occasion, just a few inches away from the embodiment of pure love, as we tumbled backwards in the Ganges. Satsang went on full swing.

That was all just my second day in Rishikesh. The rest of the course was also extremely powerful for me, and I feel I really brought a lot out of myself. One day Guruji had us all meet with a 102 year old Swami (picture attached) whose ashram was the host of our Blessings course. We also got to hear Guruji speak at an International Yoga Conference that was being held the same week down the street, which was a really great talk, and the next night, we got to watch Guruji participate in Ganga Aarti, the daily fire offering on the Ganges, hosted by the most prominent Swami of the Rishikesh area (who was actually one of the speakers at Silver Jubilee, also). My friend Spencer got some great shots of that Aarti ceremony, I’ll beg him to let me post some of them up on this blog…

I kind of jumped on the wagon for an “advance course” that immediately followed the Blessings course after asking Guruji if I could stay in Rishikesh until my sister comes to Delhi in early April (flying back down South to Bangalore seems impractical.) That Advance course was very hard for me. Counting the course in Bangalore, it was my third meditation course in a month, and my second silence course (one where all the participants take a limited vow of silence) in a row. It seemed like absolutely everything was aggravating me, and though the meditations were beautiful and I did learn a good bit, it seemed like torture (which, it is said in the Art of Living, is a good way to know you are stretching and growing, however uncomfortable that statement can be! :) ) However, I’m now free and will be looking to check into an ashram back on the other side of the river which seems more peaceful. The last day of the course (yesterday) was met with a strong downpour, a very auspicious sign in Indian culture. I really accepted it as being a blessing though. Rain is easily dismissed on the East Coast of the US, but this was the first good rain I’ve seen since coming to India, 7 weeks ago, and it made me so ecstatic that I could hardly sit still as I ate my lunch.

I’ve been staying at a Hare Krishna ashram, which is quite the experience. The ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or Hare Krishnas, as they are popularly known) is the most famously evangelistic Hindu sect. Popular press often labels them as a cult and relates their international sectors to mysterious crimes that have happened, however, most people will know them as the bald men in orange who “sing at the airports” and on street corners, proclaiming that chanting “Hare Krishna” is the only way to self-Realization and heaven. The energy here at the ashram is wonderful, but I’ve not been able to step past my reserves about the Hare Krishnas, luckily, the noise and the expense of living here is a good enough excuse to move back to the other side of the river. (They charge an “outrageous” Rs. 350 per night ($7- very high for Rishikesh ashrams and there is chanting going on from about 4 or 5 in the morning to midnight every day, not to mention the construction which starts, directly above my room, as early as 7:30.)

Rishikesh itself is really a great paradox. As always, cows are everywhere in the streets. Rishikesh seems to have a good bit more pigs than other towns I’ve seen. However, most noticeably, the line between beggars and saints here is more blurred than anywhere I’ve experienced. Seemingly every homeless person dawns saffron robes, though I’ve only seen a few of them meditate or do yoga. Many of the sadhus (spiritual aspirants) here are also infamously fond of one particular prasad (offering) of Lord Shiva- that of Bangh, marijuana. Walking by the ghats of the Ganges late at night, you can be inundated with the smell of potent weed. Walking down the streets the other night, I saw a sadhu on the other side of the road in full saffron roads and rucksack, he looked to me: “Hari om!” I returned the traditional local greeting with a pranam, hands folded lightly to my heart, “Hari om!” He smiled, “You like a marijuana?” Thickly accented, and drowned out by the evening traffic of Lakshmanjhula Road. I bashfully looked to the ground, a wide grin as I walked on to the ashram.

"Entering India" 7th Mar 2006

2006-03-14T02:47:00.000-08:00

In some way, I’m still trying to “enter” India. Something about this country is impermeable past a certain point. The India I want to find is a small village family in Gujarat, a gathering around an evening fire on a Himalayan mountainside, or the rolling expanse of the Thar Desert on some romantic, thirsty camel ride.

For some reason it is easier to fly overhead or pass on the perimeter in an autorickshaw than it is to plunge into the experience of all that India encompasses.

This is, of course, no problem for me in the States. I’ve never seen Death Valley or the Rockies, save for my cushioned seat on an airplane, but I am also never bothered by the feeling of needing to “enter” America—I am American and when I am home, it is simply undeniable, I am part of the scene and I belong there. I need not extend any effort or go through any motions whatsoever to “be American”. As much as I am who I am because America is part of my own identity, I also, to some extent, define America, at least for myself.

Feeling “at home” here in India also works similarly. Walking down the streets of Rishikesh in baggy jeans and listening to Iron and Wine on my MP3 player, I feel I am a part of India and that it is naturally a part of me. Running to Shiva temples dressed in kurta-pyjamas and sporting the tikka mark on my forehead afterwards, I feel “other”ed—by taking my own personality away from naturalness, the surrounding world pushes me out and reflects how impossible it is to be something other than the totality that I am.

“India is what it makes of you” comes to mind (John Keay, Into India) India is not only the same meditations, yoga, and chanting that I’ve been doing for years, but it’s also singing Stevie Wonder as I walk down an alleyway or having endless Chais and ice-creams when I “really should be more productive.”

Thoughts persist that I am in a beautiful and exotic country and I have endless opportunities to see new things and learn new ways of living. However, no matter that I do, I will be in this same beautiful, exotic country—everything I see is new and I already have the fullness of a way of living. There is no sense in chasing down some other “India”—actually, when in India, for sure, “India” can’t be missed!

This idea of “another India” is for sure a mirage, walking down the street or going for a meeting, it is so immediately evident that the rule of thumb for Indian culture is inactivity. Like a remnant of the caste system, it is part of life that one person (or several) watches as another works because, “it’s not my job.” (This is a very effective division of labor for a densely populated country with some amount of unemployment problems.)

Bonding between friends seems to happen with a silent agreement to do nothing for a short time. At any point in time, you can look around an Indian city and you’ll see beggars and saints, babies and grandparents—people whose lives are defined by indolence. Finally, the moment a new visitor finds they have genuinely urgent business to attend to, they almost invariably find that it is either before or after the elusive “working hours” of Indian professional life; hours which at times seem to overlap (like finding out you have come both after the last group of working hours and before the next) and which are anyway at the mercy of the seemingly random calendar of multicultural and political holidays.

Returning to the original question: how one “enters” India, might simply be answered by doing nothing. With a country that is so large and varied, with culture that is impossible to understand in any form of summary and with the close existence of so many opposites— the key of wisdom to understanding might be looking beyond the façade of bustling street hawkers and car horns and simple “doing nothing” with whoever is around; simply experiencing the truth of having already entered India.

--- A few more photos from Delhi and such

2006-03-14T02:43:00.000-08:00

I'll admit, I increased the contrast and played around with the lighting in this picture, but it's so beautiful.

The photo of the water buffalo was roadside, taken when our but broke down as we left Delhi for Rishikesh.

The photo of the dancing is on Mahashivaratri night.

--- Jaipur Photos-- Hawal Mahal and Ranthambhore

2006-03-14T02:37:00.000-08:00

These three shots are (from the fifty I took) of the Hawa Mahal in the center of the Pink City.

And the following two are from Ranthambhore National Park... our safari had this great field of spotted deer as we pulled away from the watering hole (i.e. lake) at dawn, and we met with lots of monkeys later... I have some footage of monkeys jumping over our jeep from tree to tree, which is kind of fun, but it's 2 megs...

--- Jaipur Photos #2

2006-03-14T02:30:00.000-08:00

During my ‘free morning’, I was diving in and out of anything that looked promising—and so many buildings in Jaipur do look promising; only to find that many once very grand and amazing works of architecture are now gated shut or are home to squatters. As I walked through one such abandoned building, this girl kept poking her head at me as her grandmother read a scripture on the floor nearby.

The snake charmers are an interesting form of street merchant. I also saw some guys handling pythons as they walked down the street—I’d like to read more about this, these guys seem to do well with tourists, dressed in fine clothes and boldly demanding Rs. 100 for a few pictures. This man confidently flicked his cobras in the face and told us “Come on, touch it—it’s okay!”

This shot includes the Tiger Fort (I’m pretty sure) and the city streets of Jaipur, taken from the Tower above the Pink City…

---- Jaipur photos #1

2006-03-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

This is the temple with the offering to the pigeons, really a wonderful moment.
And this is the woman who seemed to have the job of guiding the pigeons, here she is giving some sort of call to them as she sits on the ledge of a roof, two stories above the sidewalk markets of the Pink City.
As we entered Rajasthan, we were greeted at the “Tourist Rest Stop” (part of our tour package) by these loud men singing Hare Krishna… I think they were employed by the Rest Stop to make it seem “authentic” but they were still rather insistent on tips…
A Jaipur Alleyway, just inside the gates for the Pink City area.
These men are beginning to clean up these fine silk and woolen carpets after a mad-rush of carpet sales when everyone on our tour was pushed into their sales center as part of our tour. Most of these carpets are worth at least $1000

--- Photos from Fatehpur Sikri

2006-03-12T03:19:00.000-08:00

Fatehpur Sikri is a well preserved but long deserted political hub… Emperor Akbar moved his rule out of Agra for a few years and set up camp in Fatehpur Sikri until he was chased out, probably for religious reasons (though some site lack of water)— Emperor Akbar was famously tolerant of Hinduism and other faiths, holding meetings with religious scholars from all faiths. Eventually, he ventured away from the Islamic religion of the Moghuls and created his own religion, something not well received by locals at Fatehpur Sikri. Here are some photos from the main complex there—the first one is from the mosque.
A woman looking through the beautiful lattice work of the tomb, (framed by the latticework I took the photo through!) each pane is carved from a single stone.
The main room of the mosque.
Boys playing at the pool in front of Akbar’s tomb.
Men talking inside the tomb. (And more stone lattice work!)