NEVER ENDING PEACE AND LOVE

NEPAL = NEVER ENDING PEACE AND LOVE

I find it very hard to write about my time in Nepal, because of a strange dichotomy. That is, Nepal was the place that, so far at least, along my pilgrimage I both thought the least about spirituality and felt the most connected to the divine. Which I don’t think is always the case – some of the most devout people in the world do nothing but think about God, but it certainly was for me here. Why this is I think has to do with a few factors, each of which I will expound upon a bit.

In my limited experience I find that in developing countries there is much more emphasis and connection to real life. This doesn’t always manifest as a connection to the divine, but for these people life is more visceral, more real than it seems to be in developed nations. This seems to be less true in the city centers than in the rural areas, but even there it seems to be the case. In the countryside it’s obvious – the lives of people are still impossible to separate from the cycles of nature, and people are much more in touch with the Earth itself. And with fewer distractions, people seem much more focused on the little things in life, and spend much less time focused on the future, on what they desire, on what they want. So many times I have seen people just sitting, just doing nothing but not bored, not contemplating what they will buy with their next paycheck, not even looking at the clouds and finding forms within them, but just sitting in contentment. This profound connection to life still leads to plenty of suffering, especially when it manifests as extremely poor and disenfranchised people who suffer for lack of food, clean water or the like. But it seems to provide a space in which it is easier to connect to the divine - a neutral ground for the mind and god to meet, a platform from which one can easily move in a spiritual direction.

Nepal in specific is the most religious of any developing nation I have been to – filled with temples, shrines, icons and symbols of devotion, wandering holy men and a rich tradition of myths and stories that gives another dimension to life. Most names seem to be derived from scripture, for instance, and everyone is part of some religious tradition, be it Hindu, Islam or Buddhism. It’s interesting for a westerner because people in the east have a different understanding of belief and in the divine. For example, one of the myths of the creation of the Katmandu valley goes something like this –

This entire valley was once a beautiful lake, cradled in the mountains. And on the lake floated a perfect, incandescent lotus. Parvati wanted the flower for herself, so Shiva drank the waters of the lake, only to discover that they were poison, and so he drank up the entire lake and then spit it out into the ocean.

The people don’t literally believe that Shiva came down, personified, and drank the water from the valley. And yet that does not make it untrue in their understanding. And by allowing something to at once be a fiction and to be an ultimate truth is what gives myth power, and what helps to inform the lives of the people in a spiritual direction.

Here maybe I should clarify a point. I am not an advocate of organized religion. There are some manifestations which are beautiful and working towards truth, but too many times these “religions” have been the attempts of humans to use spirituality to control and enslave their fellow humans. This, too, is evident in Nepal, where the caste system is still a part of the culture. I never saw a time where it directly caused the suffering of someone, but I know that that is because of my lack of familiarity with the culture and language, not because it doesn’t exist. And it is a double edged sword – in the rural areas these negative traditions hold their most power, while in the city people often come to throw off these clinging associations but at the same time loose touch with the essential, true aspects that the religions offer. The best example of that is a friend of mine, a couchsurfer who lives in Katmandu and is part of the tourist industry, but is part of the Brahmin (priest) caste and was raised in that tradition. He knows all the myths, can probably recite half of the Vedas (Hindu scriptures) by heart, and he rebelled against that life and moved to the city to choose a much different life – one that lets him determine his place in society based on his skills, but also one that comes with all the pitfalls and traps of a secular society - alcoholism, infidelity and self induced suffering. So I’m not suggesting that we should all up and join a religion, or that I ever will identify myself with a particular belief system. I am looking for a way to enter into dialogue with the divine in as honest a manner as possible. Some can still find that possibility in an established religion and that’s wonderful.

So the first factor that contributed to my closer connection without active thought is that seems to exemplify the lives of the people here – many of them make their ritual actions, their divine worship, without conscious thought, its just accepted that every morning you light incense and place it in front of the statue of Ganesha, for example. But unlike the west, where ritual actions done without intent become hollow and meaningless, because the people here allow a story and a myth to be both true and untrue at the same time, these rituals still carry power and connect them to the divine. And without realizing it, I was influenced by this same mentality.

The next factor was that I had little time to think, comparatively with the other places I had traveled so far! For the first 10 days or so I was the constant companion of a friend I met in Korea, Amy, who is very much an ENFJ (http://www.myersbriggs.org/), and combined with the limited time she had in Nepal it meant that we were constantly on the move. Waking up early spending the day seeing sights, meeting people, trying new foods and exploring the area focused my attention outward rather than inward. Because I was/am still a prisoner of the ego this meant that I did a lot of identifying, categorizing and judging (this is like that, I don’t like this or this is great!!) rather than just accepting, so the opportunity to connect that this outward focus gifted me was left wanting for the most part. Instead of being really present, really aware of my surroundings and environment, and accepting them for what they are, I tried to put them into a frame of reference which made sense to me. Which is the same thing I do during my internal foci as well, it’s just then that the objects I am classifying then are my thoughts, rather than external forms. What I had yet to learn, and yet to effectively put into practice even now, is this presence, to observe without judgment, to interact without attachment, to simply live and love. But this time was valuable to serve as a counterpoint to my earlier time in the north of Asia in which I was thinking so much.

Amy and another friend of ours Aaron (INFP) were pretty much the 3 musketeers for the beginning of the trip, and after Amy left Aaron and I were constant companions. And the theme that runs through my entire time in Nepal is amazing conversations with these two people – both of whom are incredibly intelligent and very engaged in the world that surrounds us. While not many of our conversations were directly focused on the spiritual, they all contained at least the seed of it within. We talked about everything from politics to poetry, the caste system to rhinos, the meaning of love to our negative patterns in relationships, from couchsurfing as a form of activism to women’s rights in developing nations. Many of these conversations have had a profound impact on my life and I want to specifically thank the participants. Thank you Amy! Thank you Aaron! A few that have stood out –

The first was Amy describing her relationship with her partner, one that is really based on love. The way that they interact and the stories she told it is obvious that they are together because they care for each other, they truly put the others needs ahead of their own, and support each other. They allow each other to be who they are without seeking to change each other, and yet challenge each other to be better people and to grow. The way that her face and demeanor changed when she talked about her lover and their relationship forced me to really think about my past relationships and how I interacted. And what I discovered is that, for the most part, I have been much too self centered in my relationships, much too attached. Yes I have loved, but that love has been conditional on the other person loving me back, or stroking my ego, etc. rather than just a gift to the world that love should truly be. I had left a short but intense relationship in Portland that failed spectacularly and Amy’s relationship became an example to me what a relationship could be between two people. And I began to earnestly think about how I needed to change and grow before I could ever be in such a relationship.

Another was a conversation with Aaron in which I told him a theory of mine –

That there are four different types of attraction, and for a relationship to be perfect, for true love to have a chance to exist, each person in that relationship needs to be attracted to the other on all four levels. Those are –

*physical* *mental* *emotional* *spiritual*

Physical attraction is, unfortunately for me at least, an obvious truth and necessity in any intimate relationship. Mental is the intellectual realm, there needs to exist a similar interest and ability to discuss abstract ideas, to talk about art, etc. The emotional realm is how your basic personalities interact and how you get along. And the spiritual was the one that Aaron had never considered, but has always been important to me. But as I told him them, I still don’t know exactly what that means. Just that a potential lover must have a yearning for a spiritual life, to get closer to divine truth and love, however that manifests.

If you notice that both of the conversations that really struck me deal with romantic relationships it is not a coincidence – I knew that in a short time I would be meeting my ex-girlfriend, Michelle, in India, for the first time since we had broken up. My thoughts were often there already, thinking of what had gone wrong in our relationship, wondering what would happen when we met, if we had a possibility to reunite as lovers or if we would be able to be true friends. I wasn’t sure what I wanted even, but was constantly thinking about it. What happened between us I will talk about in the next installment of “spiraling towards the center” but I bring it up now to discuss another aspect of my spiritual quest, and that is my inability to, as Wayne puts it, “live in the now!” On my couchsurfing profile I describe myself as a “future dweller” and it is true – the vast majority of my time I am either imagining or fantasizing about various futures, or thinking about the past and what could have been. Every spiritual guru and religious leader will tell you that the divine doesn’t exist in the past or the future, but only NOW, in this instant, and so a true aspirant must learn to live in awareness. Eckhart Tolle asks you to ask yourself, “What is my relationship with the present moment?” and Thick Nhat Hanh insists that this awareness is the key to happiness. This realization is one of those that I know, logically, but yet is very hard to actively put into practice in my life.

The final factor that heavily contributed to my connection in Nepal was access to the wonders of nature. What is spirituality? What does it mean to be spiritual? These are questions that I think of often, and I'm still not sure of the answers, but in Nepal I knew that I would test one of my ideas – that spirituality is a connection with the Earth. Nepal is dominated by the Himalayas, and of course I went trekking while I was there. My friend Aaron and I decided to do the Tamang heritage trek and then the Lantang base camp trek, almost directly north of Katmandu, which would be about 11 days total. To say that I was excited was a bit of an understatement, this was really the first time I would be getting “out into nature” since my time in Hawaii, 4 months before. And while the hike itself was very challenging, it wasn’t what I was expecting. I realize now that there are few “wild spaces” left in Asia, people have been living here so long, but I was expecting to be a bit farther from human contact than we were. In the end though, we decided that rather than trekking farther we would rather spend time in one of the villages and get to know a bit more intimately, the culture of the area. Our logic was that there are mountains in the US as well that we can climb. Even still every day we would hike for hours in the area, sit on the hillside, or Dangle our feet in the mountain streams. At one point we witnessed an entire troop of monkeys running down the mountain, we came into close contact with many amazing birds and butterflies and flowers, and in another part of the country, even rhinos and elephants! So I still don’t know exactly how being in nature affects ones relationship to the divine, but it definitely plays a part. I will explore this more when I return to the states, but I’d love to hear others thoughts on the matter.