Its been a long time

Hi everybody!

Its been a while. So, I've decided to write the blog as a choose your own adventure novel. That way you can keep it nice and short or make it really long. Just look at the bold parts for directions.

When I last wrote was the start of august and I just had left Bodhgaya for Varanasi. It was quite strange to start traveling all alone for the first time and Varanasi is an intense place to start. The city is one of the most amazing places I have been. It’s made up of tiny little alleyways where a cow may take up the whole road and you might find a vender sitting cross legged in a tiny hole in the wall selling colorful leaves and pastes of an unknown purpose. I spent a few hours at the burning ghats watching the cremations, and a few more watching bhramin priests spin fire to the tune on table and vocals. Its pretty intense place both visually and culturally. You see a leg sticking out of a burning fire and then learn that women aren't allowed to be present because if they cry the person might be blocked on their way to nirvana. It was a short one day stay, but an unforgettable one. Next, I took two days of buses through the deep, terraced valleys of the Himalaya up towards Katmandu.

I spent a day in Kathmandu exploring the historic old city, new, computerized city and the most touristy area I'd ever been (pizza, ice cream and nutella!) but quickly headed to an area of Kathmandu called Bodhanath. This is where the Tibetan community lives and it has about 37 monasteries. I spent two peaceful weeks there at Kopan monastery doing meditation and reiki.

If you want to see Reid become really Buddhist at a monastery, read on. If not, skip to the next bold seciton.

I did a 10 day Lam Rim mediation course at Kopan. The Lam Rim is the graduated path to enlightenment and gives a step by step list of practices which are supposed to lead to the final goal. It is very different than anything I’d ever done before. The course begins with trying to create renunciation of ego and samsaric pleasure. The way it does this is by spending a really long time talking about and meditating on suffering and death. I did a lot of analytical meditations where I would think about how many different ways I suffer and how horrible it is, for example. I also did many visualization meditations, such as a visualization of watching myself die. These are all supposed to make one renounce all the temporary pleasures of life and commit himself fully to seeking enlightenment. At first I thought this would be incredibly depressing, but I actually found it inspiring and realistic. There is no reason to dwell on a bad mood when you know you are going to die. I have continued to do an intense practice of saying "I am going to die" over and over again to myself before I go to bed every night.

After renunciation, the course focused on creating bodhicitta, or compassion. This focused a lot on the idea that the only way one can truly help oneself is by being only motivated to help others. There is no true self cherishing thought. The Dalai Lama calls it clever selfishness. One day I was almost brought to tears by getting a glimpse of this type of great compassion. I saw that it would be possible to have compassion for every person in the world, unconditionally and take it upon oneself to work only to helping all these people. Of course, I still don't have this pure motivation. But, seeing the possibility of this pure type of motivation left me intimidated and awestruck, yet determined.

The last part of the course was focused on emptiness, or wisdom: the idea that nothing really exists, at least in the sense that nothing exists independently. I had never done an analytical meditation on wisdom before and the one we did during the course was really cool. We were to look for who we are. Are we our body? No. Are we are our emotions? No. Are we are mind? No We’re all of those things, right? But all of those things change! What is it about those things that stays the same? What continues from moment to moment? So I looked in my thoughts. Am I this thought? No, there is some part of me that is aware of this thought. That must be me. But there is something that is aware of that awareness. And that awareness too. I went through this regress for minutes and then realized there was no end, but that that was the end. There was no “I” but the moment at hand and that “I” included a lot more things than I would ever consider “I.” Its pretty hard to express this experience, but it was very great and was enough to keep me happy for weeks.

Overall the course has made me look at myself and Buddhism in a pretty new way. Using analyis and skillful means was something I had never done before in Buddhism and I found it really helpful at practically changing the way I live. I think I am more determined than before but in a much less self deprecating way. I have greater compassion for others, but also for myself. It was really cool. I think I want to do a long retreat again before I head back home.

Read here for a good time:

After Kathmandu I got on a 36 hour bus to Delhi. The few hours I spent in Delhi gave me time to check out some schools in the urban slums in the morning and then met up with lots of hippies and Isrealis to catch the bus to Manali in the afternoon. They hot boxed the bus. After 18 hours on the bus, I got to manali, then got in a jeep with 10 other people to start the 20 hour ride to Leh, Ladakh. (Ladakh is the highest inhabited area in the world and is culturally Tibetan. Its just east of Kashmir.)

The jeep ride was ridiculous. I've never been so crammed. But the scenery was unreal: a desert in the middle of the Himalaya at an average of 14,000 feet. The ride peaked with a sunset at 17,500 feet. On the jeep I met a sweet Brazilian who I spent my week in Leh touristing around with. I talked almost only in Spanish for that week, which was unexpected but really helped my language. In Leh, some highlights were doing a 3 day homestay where I was harvesting barley by hand and eating pretty much only barleyflour and salty butter tea. I saw a traditional tantric mask dance at Tiksey Monestary, without question the most bueatiful I have ever seen. I cycled up 7,000 ft to the top of the highest road, 18,300 feet. It was six hours up, 1 hour down. I also climbed a really high mountain, Stok-Kangri. It was just a really hard, 3 day hike, but the mountain was 20,188 ft. I don't think I will ever again walk so slowly or be so high. However, most of my time in Ladakh was spent working on distributing books to the local government schools.

If you want to read about Reid doing volunteer work, read on. If not, skip ahead to the next boldy.
So, I headed to Leh with a list of email contacts and the mission to set up a book distribution project. My friend Willy had given me this admirable but somewhat ambiguous mission. After being quite jaded by my time in Bodhgaya, I spent a long time checking out different NGO’s in the area trying to figure out the situation of education in Ladakh. What I discovered was quite the opposite of Bodhgaya, where education is usually viewed as a good thing that is always lacking. Ladakh has a very well structured school system, often one teacher to 5 students or so. But, many NGO’s and activists think that the schooling has very negative effects on the area. Ladakh has a very ideal and idealized traditional culture. It was made up of tiny villages that where healthy, happy and sustainable. The education brought in the India has begun to bring about a destabilization of this culture because it takes students away from there homes and makes people want what they don’t have: the luxuries of west.

When I learned of this situation, I was forced to ask a question that keeps coming up in my travels. What do you do when people want what you don’t want to give them? I didn’t want to give the schools what they wanted: lots of grammars and boring English books that would produce lots of industrious young capitalist workers. But, I still wanted to do something. Luckily I came across an NGO called HEALTH Inc. that produces their own books, which are written in the local language, cherish local culture and teach community values. I decided this would be a good solution. Unfortunately, the government had just recently kicked all the NGO’s out of the schools. This forced me to go undercover with one very committed teacher and give the books, silently, to the local schools. I was pretty happy with what I did. I ended up supplying a couple hundred books to a dozen or so schools. But, I’m still not sure what effect my work will have. On my last day in Ladakh I was very disappointed to see a teacher using the books in the exact manner I was trying to work against. She was using it as a tool to repetitively drill English vocabulary into her young, malleable students. I’m really enjoying seeing how education functions in different parts of the world, though it really confusing and depressing a lot of the time.

Read here. Where I am now:

After Leh I hopped on another two days of buses and pulled into Dharamsala where I got to meet up with my friend Schuyler. Seeing her was definitely one of the happiest points of my trip so far. Traveling alone (even though I’m usually with other people) has been incredibly rewarding, but definitely difficult as well. Getting to talk to a close friend from home was so easy and comforting and fun.

The day after I met Schuyler we went to see H.H. The Dalai Lama give a teaching. The teaching was pretty good but just seeing him was amazing. His presences just controls everyone around him; people were crying, I’ve never seen so much devotion. Very cool to see the type of compassion I had only heard about before. Now I’ve just got a week of relaxing, hanging out, and seeing His Holiness ahead of me. Just a couple hours ago I gave a urine sample to a Tibetan doctor. He read my pulse then gave me some strange pills wrapped in little green bags. I think things are going to continue to be very good.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you’re up to.

Om Mani Padme Hum,
Reid