In the past week, I’ve gone… from a land where even stop signs are flagrantly ignored… to a land where people diligently obey the myriad signs with warnings, cautions, and rules such as “do not use selfie sticks on the train” from a land where I’m glad enough to find a sketchy concrete hole in the ground for a toilet… to a land where I scoff if the toilet seat isn’t even heated from a land of brightly multicoloured houses and dazzling, dramatic clothing… to a land where houses and humans alike are mostly dressed in shades of grey and…
Tag:
mind
I’ve mainly been writing about the things that happen around here, the things I see and smell and hear and do. I haven’t been writing as much about the internal experience here, which is really the largest part of my focus. It’s a tricky thing to write about. For one, it’s so abstract, as I’ve written about before. Whatever words are used to describe the sort of personal explorations I have here are still just words. It doesn’t really capture it. A lot of it is about feelings and sensations; I’ve been doing hours of guided meditations that focus on…
You hear a lot about the intensity and vibrance of India in the West, and you see pretty colourful pictures and shocking filthy ones, and you watch some Bollywood movies and you read excellent novels. But it’s hard to convey what that intensity is actually like in person. In fact, once you come back to the West and India isn’t part of your present moment any more, it fades into memories that just look and sound a lot like the pictures and stories you’ve seen and read. In a series of five blog posts over the next few months, I’m…
Tiruvannamalai attracts all types, from serious Indian pilgrims who will go for days without sleep to walk around a holy mountain, to ecstatic Western hippies with their chakras vibrating perhaps a little too high on the Richter scale. It’s a stunning array of characters, many of whom could inspire entire whole new definitions in the DSM. I think this week we may have met a reincarnation of Rasputin. Matthew had been invited to some guy’s satsang (spiritual gathering) by a French woman he’d chatted with, and she hadn’t said much more than “he helps you get rid of your beliefs about…
Matthew and I have been staying at ashram housing since we arrived in Tiruvannamalai. It’s in high demand, and is by donation, so you can only stay a limited stretch; we’ve been allowed a week, which is pretty good, partly because we’ve also both volunteered to help with the website a little while we’re here. We’re given three meals a day (plus tea, of course). We have a little room, sparse and bare, with two fairly hard single beds and a small desk, in the most desirable section of ashram housing; private, closest to the mountain, furthest from the street.…
- 1
- 2