Well, school is over for the year. Junior year of college is done, one more left and I’m home free. Often times people encourage those stuck in school to cherish the moment because the real world is a pain in the ass and college is so easy in comparison, according to their experiences. However, fuck that. I’ve been in school since before I could stand it seems. I think the necessity of existing in an academic institution after nearly 18 years has lost momentum to say the least. I’ve realized from travelling in South Asia for 9 months that graduating college is going to be a blessing for me rather than a anathema. I’ve come in contact with enough people who just said fuck it to living a neurotically automatic life of regurgitation in the stupidity of cyclical amerikah and have lived extraordinarily and utterly amazing lives due to spitting on boundaries. My professor here, for example, 70 year old Belgium guy, hitchhiked to Mumbai, India when he was 23 across the Middle East and made it back with literally nothing but a dollar or two in his pocket. His stories are, of course, wild (being attacked by sand raiders in Iran—star wars shit or something) and one thing lead to another and gradually he just slowly migrated East and adopted a permanent settlement here. He’s been in Kathmandu since the 1970s when they only had three cars in the whole city, compared to the several thousand now. The trick is to just slowly cross the line one step at a time it seems and slowly the whole thing snow balls and doors you never knew existed just seem to open like magic. Or you wind up broke and in humiliation you beg the embassy for a plane ticket back home—only time will tell.
In my own situation, I was in great strife during the month of April over how I should spend my summer: travel, volunteer, live at an ashram, and so on…I figured after feeling anxious, to just meditate on the matter by doing a Vipassana course in Lumbini, the site of the Buddha’s birthplace in the southern lowlands of Western Nepal and answer will eventually come to me…no need to rely on the rational mind, its never really helped when it matterd anyway.
Vipassana, as I have mentioned before on here, is a 10 day meditation course where you are not allowed to speak, read, write, listen to music, or doing anything really but sleep, eat, and drink. You meditate 10 hours everyday with sessions starting at 4 in the morning and ending at 9 at night. This is supposedly the meditation that led to the Buddha’s enlightenment and everyone seems to swear by its effects at eradicating old negative patterns and leading to a happier and more peaceful life.
Well, as my semester ended, before I could even get to Lumbini, we have a speaker come in who works for an outdoor organization in Kathmandu that primarily trains villagers in first aid and wilderness survival skills so they can both work in the trekking industry (as the job opportunities for a lot of people here are extremely limited due to the inaccessibility of the region) and help others when natural disasters occur (which is quite often because Nepal rests right on a extremely active tectonic plate)…So, after the talk the Tibetan guy running the organization, Chandra, jokingly asks if anyone wants to stay in Nepal to help him out, as he assumes all of us are headed home and since his current assistant is leaving in a few days. I was just like, well, it just so happens I’m looking for a job and this sounds quite awesome and I talked to him for a little while and now it looks like I’m volunteering for the summer in Kathmandu. The universe came together.
The job is pretty mellow, mostly office work and things of that nature but I get to participate in all the training courses, which means I’ll be learning some good shit and possibly get to do some trekking and rafting for free since the company also takes people trekking, rafting, and rock climbing in the Himalayas and as an assistant I will get to come along. The office I’ll be working at also has a rock wall so that kicks ass. Chandra also does vipassana, which is kind of cool. I should be living with his family for the summer, which is good because I’ll be saving a mad amount of cash that way and he seems like a cool guy, really laid back, has lived in the united states out west for a good amount of time, working with NOLS extensively and he has crazy hair down to his waist, with some of it naturally dreaded. We should get along well.
However, meditation is my first priority. Before I leave though, I pierce my eyebrow because I needed more holes in my head and then I changed my ear gauges after stretching them out with peacock feathers to hollowed out wooden plugs, as you can imagine I look fantastic. I’m all set now. I head onto the roof for a 12-hour bus journey to Lumbini with the assistance of my dreadlocked guitar wielding lesbian hippie friend Andrea from San Francisco. The ride was awesome to say the least. We passed a bus that was just starting to pull out of being parked and there was a lone Nepali guy sleeping on the roof this bus. However, the guy wasn’t sleeping in the confines of the luggage rack where he would be safely supported against the hairpin turns, preventing him from falling off the roof. Instead, he was passed out on the spot just above the windshield and the bus was starting to pull away without anyone inside realizing this guy was unconscious on the top of the bus and all of the sudden the vehicle starts rolling down the winding road behind us. The guy starts to slide around and those of us on the roof all had to scream while laughing our asses off at the situation to signal to the driver to wake the dude up. The bus-wallah guy who collects the passenger’s cash climbed up there without the bus driver even stopping, since this is Nepal. The bus-wallahs love to climb on the side of the bus while we’re booking 50 mph, going on the roof, down the side, and back into the passenger section to hang out the door like out of a movie or something. Seems like a fun job. The guys on this ride were sort of insane, they kept yelling at every person they saw and screaming at what I gather were inappropriate comments towards the Nepalis on the street and wouldn’t stop asking me for drugs. I think they were drinking during all of this, judging by their staggering movements and slurred speech. Righteous. Andrea later on breaks out a fat joint and we smoke some shitty Nepali weed on the roof while pushing 60 mph, sharing with several villagers, all the while dodging herds of water buffalo on the subtropical jungle roads of the steamy terai—this is my college experience I guess, no complaints.
We arrive in the town, pass some horrifically deformed people begging near the gate and enter into the serene gardens of Lumbini where the Buddha was born 2,500 years ago. My pilgrimage from last November is finally complete. I went in reverse order going from place of death to place of birth by accident, I just randomly did it like that without even realizing it—I wonder what that means, probably nothing. Lumbini is actually quite beautiful, peaceful and very well up kept. The Nepali government has been pushing itself to turn this place into a major tourist attraction for pilgrims and they even built an airport not too far away. That was perhaps the most bizarre sight. We’ve been driving for 7 hours through what seem like ultra remote villages where people are living in grass huts and working on rice paddies and banana tree fields and then all of the sudden there is this fucking jet driving on a runway and its like—double take two times. The HELL is that doing there?! Lumbini though, is very serene, its sort of like how I would imagine the Garden of Eden to be, except with a fuck load more malaria. We stayed at the Korean monastery for the night and I couldn’t find my mosquito net until the next morning. I think I lost 50 pounds that night in blood alone. I kept waking up and murdering as many of mosquitoes who were chilling on the wall next to me as I could. The next morning it looked like a horror scene with all the blood smeared on the wall—I assume all of it was mine and it had only temporarily changed bodies…That was two weeks ago and I haven’t been hospitalized yet so it seems I’m in the clear with malaria—hare Krishna motherfuckers.
We start the course the next day. No more talking, no more anything but sleep, eating, and meditating. Thank god. I need a break from everything else, specifically other people. Our assistant teacher, an ultra rigid lean looking Nepali guy of 40 years wore an “Annual Square Dancing Competition” T-shirt from Dayton, Ohio nearly everyday and moldy blue sweat pants. I don’t know if this is the official uniform for Vipassana teachers but I plan on taking another course soon so I will report back if this is the case…Who the hell ships this shit over here? They should be imprisoned immediately or at the very least castrated in front of their pets. May all beings be free from suffering.
The best part of our meditation came either are on the 5th or 6th day. One of the Nepali guys behind me lets out a mild fart, which under normal circumstances would not have been a big deal. However, you must keep in mind we have now completed something around 60 hours of meditation in 6 days, haven’t spoken more than a word a day to the teacher and have been just sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting and observing without reactions or judgments this whole time—no smiling, no laughing…Completely fucking zombified. Then this happens. I feel it deep in my chest, an intense vibration comes through and I try to hold it back but a snicker breaks out. I’m like, shit, I shouldn’t laugh because I’m doing this serious meditation course and I’m one of the youngest people here and I should be more mature and then all of the sudden I hear coughed snickering come from a person to my left, then behind, then to my right. Then we all manage to hold it in and have composure for about 5 seconds and then the 40 year old French guy in front of me lets out a muffled laugh and that does it for me I’m like about to explode in laughter and I’m essentially drooling from holding this in and I have to get up and leave. The two Germans who I’m between are starting to lose it and the Nepali guys behind me already have. I get up and leave, following my Spanish roommate and he turns and looks at me and we both reflect an open mouth smiled off each other and explode in laughter and I start hearing it come from the meditation hall as well. Ten others had to get up and leave and we all just stand near the water cooler outside with sign reading “Keep Noble Silence!” laughing and laughing. However, we can’t talk and it just makes it worse because every time we look at one another we burst out laughing. I have to spend the next two hours not making eye contact to keep from losing control and I keep erupting to myself. However, I have to say, not one of us ever let it all out at once because we were all still trying to stifle it to some extent, making it just that much worse. It was great though because some of these dudes are serious mediators, not moving for 2 hours in a full lotus position and this is like there tenth course or something but even this was too much for them. Laughter is contagious and the humor of farting is universal it seems, transcending nationality and age. Most spiritual moment of the whole course perhaps.
The course itself, was excellent. I couldn’t meditate at 4:30 in the morning believe it or not (right) and usually slept while sitting on my cushion during the two hour session for an hour before starting. The other problem was that I wasn’t used to sitting cross legged, as I usually meditate in a chair on my own. Pain over and over, never ending. I started being able to meditate like such for 7 minutes without moving, I ended being able to sit for 47 minutes without moving so yeah for massive improvement. The thing that attracted me to vipassana was not only that the Buddha invented it but also its simplicity. Its entirely based around observing sensation while remaining equanimous—silent witness without judgment. Pain there is pain, pleasure there is pleasure—just observe. This act of observation without labeling leads the mind slowly down the ladder into the layers of the unconscious mind where all this mental shit (anger, hate, fear, lust, desire, and other negativities) exist and by the act of not labeling/judging these negativities they are allowed to leave the mind/body. The whole process is a mental purification essentially, which leads to the eradication of negative habits. And because you aren’t doing anything else, literally, you go really, really deep. But your mind keeps running because it isn’t trained to mellow out and the insanity that burns through your skull leads me to believe humanity is truly sick, which would explain the general state of society—we went from hunting wooly mammoths with spears and battling saber toothed tigers to the annual square dancing competition in Dayton, Ohio…holy fucking shit what went wrong? May God send death—Kindness is the highest form of wisdom and I stand by that statement.
No reactions, just observation with a neutral balance on the understanding of the law of nature—impermanence, which is that all things pass. No attachment, pleasure sensations come, let it be, they pass, pain comes, let it be, it passes. Sounds easy but it’s a massive fucking mental struggle since the mind is used to reacting with aversion to pain and craving for pleasure and that’s what creates misery and suffering. Nirvana—literally means “extinction” because it is a state of no craving, no aversion—just sublime peace and free-floating vibrations in the ocean of eternal consciousness. However, for those of us who aren’t ready to reach that point its more like beating your head against a wall for ten hours a day, sitting there and observing your mind for so long you realize, wow, I’m way out of fucking control. But, it works regardless, after the course I felt—pleasantly detached and closer to my heart and that perception of being sucked out the general flow of human conundrums we call “order” subtly came to me. I have faith in this method. They have courses that go for 45 days long…crazy stuff…Just observe respiration and sensation, never react, just let the energy flow out without acting on it…not easy…Attachment is the root of suffering, work on letting go and you will know peace. Sick of this life? Sign up for vipassana, don’t hesitate, act now! How will you know it isn’t good for you unless you try it? Like uh, methamphetamine…
Impermanence really stood out to me when I got back to Kathmandu as I found out at the exact same time that two of my best friends’ parents in New Jersey died within two weeks of each other. One of my buddies dad died due to throat cancer (cigarettes man, bad fucking shit, I never really smoked but I listen and learn) a night or two ago and another’s mom died due to brain cancer two weeks ago. Both were way too young. I had to hold back tears for my friends and also because their parents were both people I was close to and they used to joke about me being their other son when I was growing up in Jersey. Having finished this meditation course a few hours earlier in the land where the Buddha was born, a person who started what he did solely because of the problem of death/suffering—made me think really hard. Death is the reason why you don’t seek salvation or solace in worldly pleasures or the external world for that matter. I’ve gone through this fact in my head a million and one times but to feel it on that level only made it hit as a truth to home harder. Like you know getting kicked in the groin hurts but you really know it when it happens…Its fucked up, you know. You invest so much love, effort, and compassion into the world outside of you only to have it all violently stripped away without any remorse, maybe only leaving a middle finger in the vapor trail as you watch it drift away. It seems like a sick fucking joke, its truly a problem that if you look around, you can see everyone trying to deny, but don’t ever forget to look in the mirror. What is the purpose and reason for being here if everything will be taken from me? It seems very cruel on the surface layer, which is why we must dig very deep into ourselves to understand what is actually going on. You can just sit on the cruise ship all day yah gotta go scuba diving, its another world down there, although the bends might kill you.
You are going to die, that is the truth. Everyone around you will die, that is the truth. No one will be saved or spared so just stop trying now and save yourself the inevitable misery. The first noble truth—life is suffering. Why is there suffering? You attach yourself to what you are not and mistake it to be you…So that is the golden question, “who am I”…The meaning of life has been universally presented in all cultures and societies to be “know thy self”…But its paradoxical, you can’t look for it, you can only realize it, you can’t become it because you are already it, you just have to be it, and you can’t lose it, you can only forget about it…Once you realize it, you see how life is arising, passing, arising, passing, arising, passing…Who am I? There is no “I”, there is no “me”. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors and on the flip side the same goes for you.…The whole thing is just a series of arising and passing layers that you misidentify as a separate awareness in a cold and frightening world. Just watch it all drift away without any attachment in peace. The question becomes “who is it that that this pain and suffering happens to?”…The answer is silent. Decay is inherenet in all things, work out your salvation with diligence! And with that I pass into parinirvana and all is well with the cosmos…
Its just a movie. Stop acting, pull back, just watch and there won’t be a problem. Ah! I told you, see tiss all good. In the meantime, Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. There is no time limit here…This brings me to one of my more interesting interactions—that of the Mad Frenchman…
Pierre, a 41 year old Frenchman who owns a Hostel down in Southern Mexico has done as of date, five vipassana meditation courses. He was headed back to Kathmandizzle with me so we took the 9-12 hour ride together and started talking. I saw he had a book on 2012 with a book mark from Goa with a psychedelic Alex Grey painting and DMT written in large letters on it. Since he had traveled through Latin America and such I asked him about Ayahuasca and he was like, “Ah yes, Ayahuasca is for the helping the blind mind, SEE!” while gesturing erratically. He didn’t speak English too well but good enough and we continued to talk and he began to explain to me his peyote trips out in Mexico, alone in the desert…He had a sort of Pink Floyd analogy for the whole thing as he saw this massive wall of bricks and how he kept trying to fit himself into this wall but suddenly realized he just didn’t fit into this mold of humanity and then turned around to see the infinity of life behind him and what he had been missing the whole time by trying to fit in so to speak. I don’t know how much of this was metaphor but idk I thought it sounded kinda cool.
So now he has been going out on these 40 day experiences into the desert (Egypt/Chili), without peyote, just meditating and such channeling revelations from spiritual beings from other dimensions and mapping out the true nature of god, arriving at mystical revelations and such. He told me he experienced this being come to him during his meditation session in the cell, which is a small little room they stick you in during vipassana retreats for two hours or so…Pierre told me this being came to him and was like the white light, informing him this is who he truly is and he is actually from another galaxy and he will soon be returning to this other dimension to meet his true parents in this other world…Now, I’m open minded and probably suffering from an underlining psychosis of some sorts at the very least but I couldn’t really relate to this experience. I just sort of listened, occasionally nodding my head, helping him find the word in English he was looking for and what not…However, at the same time, this kind of shit has happened and been recorded for thousands of years in all religions…When you tap into the unconscious mind you experience odd things like contact with beings and other mythical symbolism, sort of Junigan, Joesph Campbell thing. The only thing is that I would interpret such things as symbolic rather than literal, meaning this “being” is an expression of an emotion or past experience or something along those lines…But, I mean when you reach that psychological level this kind of shit seems more than real. There is a reason why religions have such intricate and other worldly gods inhabiting higher realms and such. However, my personal view is that simplicity is the best path. Just be in this moment and ignore the mind and feel the world around you, that’s enough. I admit I love crazy far out shit as it gets my gears moving but I don’t take it seriously, like uh, politics.
Pierre would violently gesture and make sound effects for explaining his experiences and grab me in different places to convey what happened to him. The Nepalese on the bus thought he was hilarious and couldn’t stop staring and laughing at him, while he talked to me but he told me their judgment arises merely from ignorance and fear of the unknown. Pierre told me during his first vipassana course he experienced a state of bliss and erupted into uncontrollable crying on the floor…Several days later on a train he started handing out money to everyone, beggars and the average passengers, giving away nearly 300 dollars. His wife just shook her head and told the passengers “sometimes he just goes crazy!” …
Gently, my mind escapes into the relaxing
world of pleasure, a pleasure that'll take
my mind off the reality of my life,
my past life... life as I know it now.
And whatever may come, it slowly
disappears to somewhere in the back
of my mind. It will remain there,
until I wish to retrieve it.
Yes, I will stay here for a while,
for I need the break. A break from the
pressures of life, and everything
that lays in the palm of life's hands.
This mode is incredible. It's out of
this world. Too bad I must always leave it...
... but that's life
-gently/slipknot
Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteG