Resoconto.
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2008
1
18
Trip End
Feb 12, 2009
Dunsborough,
Western Australia,
Australia
Thursday, January 29, 2009
India has, for all of its history, drawn those who seek to her embrace. Since before recorded history, her soil has nourished minds of the highest calibre - men and women of the spirit, in search of the meaning and reason for human life. She has given birth to some of the finest intellectual minds in history, who in turn provided us with everything ranging from mathematics, metaphysics, medicine and meditation - and everything in between. She has been subjugated countless times, but never defeated. She has outlived many other great civilisations and their rule, and always showed the world that giving is far superior to taking. However, orientalism aside, she is as much a whore as she is a mother to the world.
Her beauty and transcendent attraction is partly obscured by her embrace of the blind materialism that is humankind's highest religion at present. And why shouldn't she? Everyone else seems to be able to take a piece of the cake. And India, being her size and having her historical and cultural stature, much like China, is entitled to a piece of the cake. But while the cake's eaten, so is the eater him and herself. India's majesty is being overshadowed by her development. Nonetheless, she's survived all other attempts to destroy or overpower her, so why should this be any different at all?
I don't think it will be.
I traveled for close to 3 months in the subcontinent, and in this time I witnessed the deep and the shallow. The shit and the overwhelming beauty of this land of contrasts. In India, her name is Bharat. This means land, and indeed, India is a microcosm, with all the questions and all the answers that have ever been asked and responded to in our entire history. It is the first place where human beings, amazed by the sight of the night sky, sought to find that expansiveness within themselves. And so, the rishis of yore, sat below the night sky and gazed at the space within themselves. In time, they experienced the answers, and freely distributed them in seeking to give rise to an enlightened society.
This is a far cry from the desperation of modern India. She's been raped by crazed Islamic rulers since the beginning of the second millennium, as well as by the British and other colonial powers, whose modern day prosperity in great part stems from having bled her dry, leaving her, at the time of independence, feeble and susceptible to disease. There were the expections to both the Islamic rulers and the British - Akbar comes to mind. After all, even they are trapped in the human condition, and ultimately seek the same thing. India has an uncanny ability to provide answers and experiences to this eternal condition that no other land has had on the same scale. However, people clammer after the shallow, alienated existence we in the 'developed' world have. Who can blame them? We have achieved what no other human before the industrial revolution was capable of doing on such a large scale: we've cocooned ourselves in distractions so well that we simply need to breathe, and thinking is no longer required.
The struggle has been taken out of human existence for us in the West. We are the human beings in Wall-E. Our senses are occupied and our mind silenced. We are constantly injected with a dose of anaesthetic and enter a coma that seems to last our entire life. We choose it, and in the end it's always our own finger that keeps the flow constant. Why would we want to take the finger off the drip? After all, the high it provides, the numbness it affords, allows us to continue our own lives without much difficulty. And yet, at the end of the day we continue to suffer, because anaesthetic can only numb the body, not the mind - and all things originate in the mind. I can see this so clearly now. Thank you India. Thank you for showing me that happiness doesn't lay in an inability to feel truth and to drink of its fount. Thank you for showing me life, in its most naked, vulnerable and true incarnation.
India has allowed me to glimpse life. And this glimpse has to be developed into a full view - a panorama of existence, viewed from the highest platform, the mind. The way has been shown by countless human beings - some obscured and some idolised. But most importantly, as the one who achieved the highest realisation declared upon his physical demise, we must "Work out your own liberation with diligence." It's that simple, and that's why it's so difficult.
Thank you India. I'll feel your embrace again soon.
