broadcast 03.19.05--Notes from the field (india/nepal)

hi everyone

the retreat is over and i'm back in the chaos of india - varanasi. and after the silence and minute-by-minute accuracy of the retreat routine its kind of soothing to be in the midst of such breathtaking chaotic detail: labyrinths of lanes, wood piles, burning bodies, wandering cows, the steps leading down into the river ganges, and fantastic architecture where even the collapsing buildings are amazing to look at.

the retreat was essentially about establishing a mindfulness practice, and of understanding its value. but mindfulness as dependent arising was the overall theme that emerged for me - the realisation that nothing needs to (or can) be forced, its just about putting the causes and conditions into place and then letting the transformations naturally occur. and of course the causes and conditions for anything are oceanic and extend beyond even our perceptual time frames, so the importance of faith and trust in the teachings, of long term goals that transcend this present life, combined with 'goal-lessness': a willingness to sit and study and practice without any sense of waiting for something to happen - a willingness to 'walk in the dark in our best clothes' as the zen teachers say. with a sense of silent creativity that transcends anticipation. or as the taoist assassin in "all tomorrow's parties" puts it: 'anticipation of outcome invites, if not failure, an absence of grace.' living life is not the same as assembling a bookshelf: it's not something that can be viewed as a 'problem' with a 'solution'. there is only one way to assemble that bookshelf but a million ways to understand your life. it is beyond technique, and even beyond memory and biography.

a woman asked a rabbi: "how can i make sure that i find the right person to marry?"

and the rabbi replied: "its more important to be the right person than to find the right person..."

off to nepal now to renew my visa...

(.......)

on the overnight bus to sonauli (the border town that will let me into nepal), with a sick friend at my side and a visa in my passport that will expire five hours before we make it to the border crossing. anxious thoughts about how the immigration officials will treat me - a perfect situation for backsheesh demands and me in no position to bargain. but with the retreat still fresh in my mind i'm able to just watch the thoughts come and go and drop them for something neutral and sweet like watching the breath flowing in and out of the body.

5 a.m. - we wake up the immigration office in the middle of the night, in the midst of an electricity blackout. sleepy guard checks our documents by candlelight and either doesnt notice or doesnt care that i'm a day late - i go through without a hitch.

now in katmandu awaiting new indian visa. suddenly there's music everywhere, good food, western comforts of all kinds (the kind of things that you in the west probably dont recognise as comforts anymore)...

the longer i spend out here the more i have to settle for a kind of silence in the face of the sensory overlaod, a willingness to just look and see, to pass through landscapes and cityscapes without trying to translate them into memory, into biography. on the computer next to me an achingly sweet indian pop song is playing and i know i will probably never hear it again, and more and more of my life feels like this. the common name for this is "beauty".

I’m reading a piece of writing by an American living deep in the wild-lands of Montana. Its wonderful reading someone write about phenomena that they love clearly and dearly, and are a part of a wider web of love and attunement. His descriptions of snow are so personal, so complex and true. they are a model of how to see, how to love and apperciate. here are some passages:

“The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski while the moon is still full. The clouds are gone and the night is cold. Due to some random sequence of the frost-thaw cycle – warm snow followed by repeated nights of intense cold and, who knows, perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena – the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake now recrystallised into a perfectly planar structure. The entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted into a land of fish scales, three feet deep, each one silver-blue in the light of the moon. The re-formed flakes are arrayed in all directions, bristle in the cold, leached of all moisture, dry as fossil fish scales. And though most of them are one micron thick, and lying parallel to the ground and the pull of gravity, enough of them tilt upward, as if in strange geological yearning, so that they sparkle and glint like huge sequins in the blue light. The entire world ablaze with shimmering coronas and prisms cast by the fish scale flakes..."

"Through snow as loose as sand, the blades of our skis cut across these fish scales, making music as if we’re crossing sheets of glass wind chimes…”

“… it seems like something from a fairy tale – such a soft, heavy, calming snow. What if the world doesn’t end in fire or chaos, but in snow? All the despair through the years not merely hidden but transformed, covered with beauty, converted to beauty…”

“… the snow comes down. Not as some meteorological phenomenon, but as if some dense and infinite reservoir has opened up…”

“… on some mornings, with new snow across the cabin roof like the warmest quilt in the world, I’ll work for two or three hours before the ice-skin between tin-roof and snow becomes slick, viscous. Suddenly the whole shittaree releases, and the curve and arc of rooftop snow cascades past my window, followed immediately by a sparkling shower of smaller ice crystals in the big slab’s wake, crystals as shimmering as fairy dust…”

and then this paragraph, with its beautiful opening sentence:

“You stare at things longer in January. Seen from the window of my writing cabin, the frozen gray limbs of the alder are a maze…”

that opening sentence struck me so clear, got me remembering japan and its literature: sei shonagon’s eclectic lists (“things that make the heart beat faster”) and the endless sadness of ‘genji monogatari’.

also, i got this from my friend andrew. thought you may like it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html http://www.edge.org asks leading scientists and philosophers to consider, at the end of every year, "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" A few notable responses... Alison Gopnik Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The Scientist in the Crib" I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces. -------------------------- David Buss Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire" True love. I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love. While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. -------------------------- Donald Hoffman Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence" I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival. If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. -------------------------- and yourselves? answers on a postcard to tushita - or by email if you're really living that fast... my address is: tushita meditation centre, mcleod ganj, dharamsala, kangra district, HP 176 219. put my name in top left corner (shenyen or martin). i hope to be back at tushita by april 1st. plan to stay there six months, and then i have to make some decisions - decisions neither big nor small in the grand scheme of things but nevertheless exciting and unnerving and open and blind ... where to go, how to live.... till next time, shenyen.