A quick connection!!!

What a surprise! Finally after a month a computer with a faster connection... nothing to complain about but a backspace key that barely works and a room so small you could touch the other ten people in it without moving from the plastic stool one sits on! So maybe just a moment for an update before I head up on The Road To The North, a title kindly taken from the sensei Basho, a nice haiku beginning "Determined to die a weather-beaten skeleton..." but this road to the north is the yatra to the great Buddha places in the poor state of Bihar by Varanasi. Being led by my friend Kedaar and a venerable monk Bataji from south in Hoompli, who will chant and tell stories as we travel from one place to the next. Our crew will be about ten, made up of a couple Candians, Australians, Indians, a Thai, and me the lone American. Leaving the overwhelming Bombay tonight on a 30 hour train trip at midnight...

But back a week or two ago, the ten day course has ended, and I was so fortunate to meet a very kind old student, living in both Igatpuri and Saudi Arabia, a Californian no less, who had me over for tea and introduced me to the afternoon walk that the bungalow ATs and other students take as the sun is setting over the dirt towns and wandering water buffalos outside Dhamma Giri in Itagpuri. Being by far the junior member of the group (in age as well as panna) it was a pleasure to be in such company, and an inspiration as well in some ways. Meeting so many of these old students and ATs, it really has been so interesting just how many variances and differences there are in personalities and characters. Vipassana definitely works as mental purification, and sometimes it seems like those edges of the ego should blend into one Buddha-like compassionate image-- well, maybe it takes away the rough edges first and we all still have such hard spots that they are still going. Who knows. Not a question for this stage, anyway :) Did hear an interesting story that when the Weezer lead singer attended a course at Dhamma Giri an American (and apparently very SoCal) documentary crew followed him around on Day 0 and went filming all inside the cells and hall, and then showed up 10 days later, and also trailed him around Burma-- a documentary on this rock star embracing meditation due out shortly I guess-- and another documentary about Goenkaji's tour in North America 2002...

Each day more I spent at Dhamma Giri, as the time unfurled a tad more, I felt a greater understanding building on of the technique and of the mind-body relationship. But with this kind of thing, it so often feels like the more one is learning, the more dukkha one is exploring, the more and more one sees the life just immeshed immeasurably in ignorance and blind reactions-- "wisdom is nothing more than the stripping away of illusions"-- very true words.

The more time spent, I also began to find the operation of Dhamma Giri _slightly_ less confusing. Only slightly. The gang of 8 or so Indians who seemed to do nothing but hang out and stare at you as you did anything, mediate occasionally and play Centerball (or Sentabaru) when not, seemed to somehow start to make sense. But did the Indian bureaucracy ever? Likely no. It took days on end to find some Dhamma service I could do. Meetings with people who never showed up or kept me waiting for at times nearly an hour, sometimes while we were nearly face to face in an office and I started to wonder if my physical body had somehow gone away and was visible only to me. "Should I come back at another time? I can meditate and come back in the afternoon." "No no, now you just wait, I will be with you shortly." And so went a short lived job typing Pali, another at Dhamma Giri itself by all the 45 day students doing very difficult gardening and digging. To change rooms from a hot dorm room with no circulation and beds one foot too small, an entire night unable to sleep, took three days, several individuals, and this was even knowing of this infamous bureaucracy and going to an old (Western) student first to ask guidance. In India the status of how long you can make another wait determines in part your own importance, and this combined with Indians not wanting to take the trouble to having to find an answer for even the most simple question, so they tell you any answer at all, just to be rid of you, makes for a very difficult time. Goenkaji has apparently said that two cultural sankharas are so culturally entrenched in the East and West that it takes very diligent work for the people to even discover they are not correct behavior-- in the East (India) it is telling false information, and in the West it is believing that non-committed but consensual relationships are perfectly healthy.

Here is what I wrote to a couple friends...

"India is an amazing country so long as you have no attachment to anything getting done anytime soon or at all, anything working or being able to get answers, or wanting anything accomplished. If you don't have these in your mind, you can love it. When the Western notions creep in, you are doomed, in a land where the smallest thing can take hours of meetings, tea drinking, sitting around confused and hopeless... anyway... "

Written after trying to do a simple activity and foolishly thinking it should not take all day-- buy books at Dhamma Giri and check email in town. The books had to weigh an exact weight, but there was no scale to be found, and the man working there told me what this imaginary weight should be, then to buy the books had to go to another office where I had to pay VRI through credit card but the credit card machine was not working... went on like this from late morning to mid afternoon, finally got it all sorted out, arrived in an internet cafe in Igatpuri at 3.53 pm, was told power would be shut off in town at 4. Attachments!

Made it to Bombay after the center (see huge cricket grounds on photo here), greeted by seeing a taxi taking fresh fish in a bucket fastened to the top of the cab and a whole crew of crows flying onto the speeding cab to take the fish in their mouths and fly away! You may hate India upon seeing a rat in your hotel room, but what is there not to love at this! Now at a very small Hotel Lawrence, the "Vipassana hotel", very nice Dhamma vibe, now to try to post this entry before some other Indian accident tries to take it all away...!