Outta Here

Well, I wanted to drop one last KTM post on the containers, neglected as they have been. Lot's of reflection to do here and hopefully I will get to some of it when I return. It looks like my writing schedule is going to be grueling!

Love to Nepal, Kathmandu, and all the folks who made me feel welcome here.

Oh My Buddha!

Things are wrapping up here in Kathmandu and I am going to a sitting retreat for my final week here, I hope. I won't know until it is too late. So, if you here from me after August 14th, that means it didn't work out. Anyway...

Kathmandu and Lhasa did a good number on me. I am pretty happy with the way things have gone, all things considered. Staying in Lhasa would've been good and nice and career advancing and all that, but coming to KTM was like coming home. And that feeling itself was worth all the expense and pains in the arse.

Learning or relearning that Kathmandu is a home for me is valuable because I had been doubting, before this summer, that I had a home in Asia. I have had several historically, but this past spring I was all up in a knot about to abandon Asian studies altogether. It feels good not to do that.

Now I need to reconcile the world I created for myself in Madison that is anchored around that former distance from Asia. I need to see if my revived love for the mystical orient is tenable in that situation. I think it is.

I am very excited about the retreat. I am trying not to be to excited because it could very easily not happen, due to the deeply accomplished incompetancy of filing systems at the Jyoti Bhavan. So, if it happens, it will be a joyful walk through a bunch of shit I have accumulated in the last year and maybe I can do some housecleaning of that nastiness.

The perennial "I am going to change everything about my life so that it is better and healthier and good" feeling is creeping up on me and I am going to give it a shot. Between returning refreshed from Asia and sitting inbetween and a monstrous Issan feast during my five hours in Bangkok and the joy of returning to the motherland, I am feeling pretty positive about my ability to do some serious work where I work needs be done and some serious chillaxing where chillaxing need be done.

(My mom used "chillaxing" in an email to me the other day!)

In love and respect for balm and poison,

Transportative Radicality.

Wouldn't this place be nicer without so many cars?

Ever ask yourself that? I do, all the time.

Especially here in Kathmandu where the city is small enough and the roads are narrower than that. Why not just cut them out. They don't get you anywhere faster here. They often only provide more comfort and mediation from what some might imagine to be an unsavory environment of filth and poverty.

But, if their were no private cars, thing would be so much more pleasant, I think.

Yoga, Pain, and Death

Three ways to meet with pain:
Retreat
Watch
Breathe

Retreating is obvious. That is what we do naturally, in most cases. We feel the pain and we don’t like it. Sometimes we don’t even get to not like it; our lower brains associate pain with danger and react for us. If we don’t like it, what a luxury of freedom, then we can run from it.

Watching is less obvious, but sometimes happens naturally in a state of shock and/or wonder. If, again we have the luxury of pause before running scared from the painful moment, we watch curiously and with interest, we can delay further the retreat and perhaps, eventually, stave it off. Watching means using our mind’s sensitivity to feel and look into the pain with an even mind.

Breathing is not obvious at all, but we do sometimes naturally alter our breathing in suffering moments. Take hyperventilation for instance. While hyperventilation may be a strong function of lower minds, it is not something we choose to do. When confronted with pain, in addition to watching, or instead of watching, we can breathe into that pain. What does that mean? That is difficult to explain, but it has to do with shifting the focus of our conscious awareness to the point or region of suffering and being aware of the pain, looking at it with primary focus on the movement or lack of movement and sensation in the region. Another way to explain this is to say that it is possible to intentionally direct the health, wealth, and nutrition of breath to a particular place in the body.

The point of all this, in my mind recently, is to prepare for death. I am fortunate to have a lovely life full of wealth, power, and health. With that freedom, I don’t need to devote myself to aggrandizement of this life style. I do that, certainly, but I don’t need to do much. I don’t have to hunt or pick my food, for instance. And, these simple practices of the mind do help with this life’s bounty. There are some significant results to yogic approaches to suffering, pain, and discomfort. Howev er, the most painful, or rather, the most frightening thing I will do in this life is die. And that is the Suffering I see on the horizon and I see it as the major challenge and the greatest adventure I could broach. It is, as I see it the final frontier. Many of the Buddhist teachers I have listened to have scoffed at that with the assumption of multiple (in fact, beginningless) lifetimes. While I see the reasoning for it, and I accept it as logical, I do not have any evidence for it myself, and so can barely rely on it.

Thus, the major hurdle I see coming is not far off complete enlightenment.

It is instead to survive death.

Oxymoronic? Maybe so. But, the survival I am talking about is not that of the physicality of our body or brains or what not. I am talking about mental survival. I am talking about consciousness beyond physicality. I wonder what happens at the time of death and I would like to be there to see it. And by be there, I mean to avoid falling unconscious. I want to walk my awareness all the way up to the time of death and see what happens.

And, if I can keep walking, I will.

I just want to see how far I can get.