This is a continued piece, the second half the day's events of September 2nd in Nepal. You can read the first half here.
Pokhara, Nepal
September 2
Early Evening
I perched on a wall by the local football pitch. After my – for want of a better word – mis-coordination of timings, Pip had taken herself on a short hike, and so it was my turn to wait. At the far set of goalposts, a cow lazed in the grass swatting prospective flies with its tail whilst squibs of young men kicked around a battered ball on the cusp of its final days.
One of them waved to me, laughing at my bemused white face, shouting ‘Manchester, Manchester, Manchester!’ to no end, and wearing a familiar red kit with the name Rashford printed across his bony shoulders. Football was always a stranger to me, but even I could recognise this name.
Already, I had explored the area – a tight-knit Tibetan neighbourhood – and seen the following: a local woman nonchalantly chasing water buffalo down the street; a monastery deserted (briefly imagining the red robes hung on the line were the sole remains of monks abruptly vaporised); and rows upon rows of emptied houses, their walls shaking with the reverberation of some relentless thumping beat.
I tracked down the beat’s source to the community hall.
Outside, adhering to their better nature, heaps of children darted around and played with one another. Inside, at least a hundred adults were gathered, the majority women, dancing in one large circle to throaty, rampant traditional music that pulsed the base of your spine.
Their movements appeared deceptively simple at first, just as all art-forms when expertly executed are often made to look easy. Theirs was a well-rehearsed routine of swaying, weaving, flourishing the arms and pirouetting, whilst downstairs – the main engine driving and holding it altogether – was their footwork; a most complicated series of sequences flawlessly drawn, one foot cooperating with the other effortlessly, as precise as a needle and compass.
Watching closely, I marvelled, for it was a wonder they did not trip over themselves.
Fundraisers intercepted me nearby the hall, promoting women’s empowerment and conscious living. They encouraged me to contribute to their cause, and I did so by paying to guess the weight of a bag. As it turns out, I have an extremely poor grasp of the weight of things.
The fundraisers told me to return in an hour to share dinner with the community. I thanked them warmly and asked if there’s anything I could bring. They shook their heads and replied: there’s nothing to bring but yourself.
And so, here I found this self, my ‘self’, sat on the wall, looking to make the best use of the next hour. It did not take me long to decide. I considered that on my approach to this neighbourhood, ‘The Paradox of our Age’ by The Dalai Lama was written against a brick wall. A few lines of which still circulated my head.
‘We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time.’
‘We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbour.’
‘These are times of fast food but slow digestion; tall men but short characters; steep profits but shallow relationships.’
‘It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.’
From what I had observed so far – at least for today – I was glad to conclude that this particular community lived in opposition to such statements.
Suitably inspired, I took out a small book from my bag: An Introduction to Buddhism and Tantric Meditation by The Dalai Lama. The book had found me in previous days inside a little bookshop by the Boudanath Stupa in Kathmandu.
I turned to the first page and ingested the introduction, some jewels of which I cannot resist but share with you now. Indeed, such jewels are made for sharing.
The following snippets are copied directly from The Dalai Lama’s opening argument: ‘The Need for Religion in our Present Lives.’
Take your time with them: let them soak in.
'Material progress always stimulates desire for even further progress, so that such pleasure that it brings is only ephemeral. On the other hand, when the mind enjoys pleasure and satisfaction, mere material hardships are easy to bear; and if a pleasure is derived purely from the mind itself, it will be a real and lasting pleasure.’ ‘No other pleasure can be compared with that derived from spiritual practice. This is the greatest pleasure, and it is ultimate in nature. Different religions have each shown their own way to attain it.’
'Pleasure and pain, in a general sense, do not arise only from external factors, but internal factors as well. In the absence of the internal response, no amount of external stimulation can effect pleasure or pain. These internal factors are the after-effects or impressions left on our minds by past actions; as soon as they come into contact with external factors, we experience pleasure or pain again.’ 'An undisciplined mind expresses evil thoughts by evil actions, and those actions leave evil after-effects on the mind; and as soon as external stimulation occurs, the mind suffers the consequences of its past actions.’
His words resonated on first absorption. Here, uncannily enough, and masterfully articulated, was another re-occurring sign of a discovery I had repeatedly made through my own lived experience. Without stopping to think or edit, I scribbled undiluted across the blank page at the back of the book.
‘There is apparently no such thing as happenstance. Whatever occurs happens as a result of a past occurrence. This much I can comprehend and this much I would say is self-evident. You can see it for yourself: it is readily observable.’
‘That which I have observed for the past two to three years is the spooky quality in which one happens to be ‘in the right place at the right time’. * Just as with this book, I ‘happened’ to go into that bookshop, ‘happened’ to choose it because it related to tantric meditation, and now ‘it just so happens’ to elaborate upon the same discoveries I have made in recent years.’
‘Namely, that the mind is a receptacle of tangled impressions. That these impressions, in turn, influence our overlaying perceptions – and such overlaying perceptions increase our likelihood of behaving in a certain manner, thus further deepening said perceptions – indeed shaping the characters we play and how we choose to interact with others in the worlds we inhabit.’
I looked up from my notes to the boys playing football, laughing, cajoling and taunting one another. For all appearances, they looked light, carefree, unbothered. Perhaps their minds were too young, perhaps they hadn’t yet been fully stretched through the rack and rigmarole of life’s habitual astonishments and disappointments, or perhaps there were few others in existence as stricken as my-self.
Though appearances, I took great care to remind this self, were famously deceiving.
Still, looking back down at my notes, I couldn’t help but visit that familiar feeling again: that I was alone in my acute awareness; in carrying the heavy burden of an impossibly knotted psyche; and in daily contemplating the madness of individual minds attempting to co-exist.
The rough conclusion is (and may always be) in the process of being drawn. For now, it goes something like this:
That through the matrix of our own individual minds, we each exist within our own reality, a reality that is superimposed upon one absolute reality.
Consider the multitudes of separate and disjointed realities that daily go to bed, attend meetings, sit down at dinner tables, invent laws, wage wars, or (god-willing/god-fearing) attempt marriage together.
(Kudos to all who are successful by the way; it appears by no means to be an easy feat.)
Countless lived realities butting heads against one another; sabotaging their neighbours’ with information and ideas that do not compute; that threaten to tear apart the entire fabric of those carefully-maintained and often-guarded realities.
(The trick, of course, is in understanding the necessity of chasing down these foreign ideas; in deliberately seeking out such kryptonite that we are empowered to destroy and rebuild our realities over and over again. But maybe talk is best saved for another time.)
Pip arrived before my mind could really sink into deeper contemplation, or possibly analysis paralysis - which of the two it was to be I would never find out.
Curiously enough, with her arrival, a gaggle of lanky teenage boys suddenly materialised to join us. They were aged around seventeen to twenty, and interested to know what had brought us to the country.
Here then – as with every real-world interaction – was another opportunity for an exchange of perspectives. To sample the reality of another. To ingest a foreign body, and see if the mind either accepted or rejected it.
I told them my vague reasons for being there. That I was quite simply drawn to deepen my own spiritual practise – in particular to pick up a little more of yogic philosophy – and that I was drawn to many Eastern philosophies, especially Buddhism, and that I sought to expand my own state of consciousness, to continually seek discomfort, and to expose myself to cultures in a corner of the world so drastically different from my own.
The mechanics of how it was to all happen, that I submitted to fate.
Some of them seemed concerned I appeared to have so little resembling a plan, and were not even persuaded by my Disneyland argument to stoutly follow the heart when it knows where it wants to go. Though, admittedly, a few others were astounded and thrilled by the idea.
On one thing they were all unanimous: in expressing how lucky I was to be able to travel at all. I could not help but agree with them. Fortune was indeed on my side, that I even had both time and opportunity to do so.
A few of the boys told me that from their vantage point it seemed Westerners never seemed to work, only travel the world according to their whims and desires.
I couldn’t help but correct them somewhat: though a minority might never need work, the majority had no choice. A few of us were lucky to do what we loved for a living. Some were fortunate to thrive; many still struggled to survive.
We asked the boys about themselves. What were their own plans and aspirations; would they, if possible, ever stretch their wings?
They told me they did not think so far ahead, and if pressed to consider the future, their only clue as to how it would play out was in their responsibility as the next generation of Tibetans. Their elders had told them clearly it was of the utmost importance they carry on the traditions, spread the knowledge of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and quite significantly, preserve the Tibetan language.
On one last point, we could not disagree. The quality of life and the cost of living varied greatly across the world. Where and whom you are born to determined a huge proportion of one’s life before one held any stake in shaping it.
*
Pip and I collected our plates, joined the boys and their community by the hall outside. We were served Tibetan bread, vegetable curry, spinach, chili and rice. We ate as the locals did, with our hands, and as a universal sign of delicious food, that which needs no translation: we ate with very little conversation.
They did not let us wash our plates. Actually, they did not let us do anything to help at all. As we both left for the walk home, I could not help but return to the words written in The Dalai Lama’s book. I could not help but consider my own mind-scape, and how already in my travels thus far, many of my perceptions had not only been tested but exposed as false.
I considered that -
where others had seen an open and friendly hand, I had first seen an opportunist; a likely scammer; a lurking predator. Where others had seen local curiosity; I had first felt the cold stare of hostile eyes fall upon the alien. These, only a couple of many twisted perceptions, were nothing more than busy phantoms caught in the filter:
and yet – believing in them made them so.
Consciously or unconsciously, this mind-scape I had surely nurtured.
Of all the feelings I had been puppet to – whether of elation or ecstasy, or (as of more recently) the surfacing of irrational fears, deep-rooted paranoia, and consistent distrust of the other – these were all the distortions I had fed and watered: the active components that, when inflamed, dominated my personal reality.
1. Such realisations can be startling and brutal when they first occur.
2. Often – it seems – entirely disabling.
3. In actuality, such realisations are the exact opposite: they are entirely empowering.
You see, in this moment of clarity, you are removed from your status as helpless victim to circumstance, and reinstated to that which you always been: the creator of your experience, the caretaker of your mind.
The fact is we occupy the roles of jailor and prisoner simultaneously; we live in prisons of our own making. We migrate from one prison-state to the next in the constant reinvention of the mind-scape. At times, it is hard to delineate whether we are in control of the states of our mind or the states of our mind are controlling us.
This prison analogy need not be read so literally.
If it comes across as bleak, forgive me, this is merely my shortcoming as a writer.
Simply, what I am trying to say is that if – at least for significant lengths in our lifetimes – where we are to be bound and confined to our various constructs of ‘self’, let us never forget to recognise our own authorship in the making.
The self evolves and we can direct the evolution: every living moment presents a chance to commit to a rewrite.
Soon after these trains of thought had run their course, I left the inner-world and returned to the outer. It felt as though a clearing had occurred. As if some tide had washed up and out, first clearing the shore and then leaving behind something in its wake: a simple recollection.
Without really knowing why, I felt the need to share it. I split Pip and mine’s shared silence, recalling the words one Kathmandu local told me on my first day in Nepal –
‘Do you know what the letters of Nepal stand for, brother?’
I shook my head.
‘Never-Ending Peace And Love.’
-
* You can check out some footnotes here exploring the probability of accident, of ‘being in the right place at the right time’ – a sort-of context and background exposition if you will.
Thank you for your time and ingestion.
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