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:
spirituality
It’s finally happened. After four months without leaving the orbit of Arunachala, I have broken free of the gravitational pull of the mountain and made it to Chennai as planned. I really did expect to do some short trips outside Tiruvannamalai at some point in my visit. It just never happened. For the first two months, I felt no desire to go anywhere else; then by the time I was starting to get restless, I either had weekend plans, too much work during the weekdays, or was having enough intermittent issues with my digestion that the idea of a long …
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 …
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 …
Before I get you caught up on India, a side note: you’ve probably heard by now that Mount Agung in Bali finally erupted over a week ago, after two months of rumblings and tremors and steam that caused the evacuation of many locals, and a lot of travel concern. I almost didn’t go to Bali in October because of the volcano threat, but it turned out to be fine. And, at this point, it is actually still pretty safe there for tourists. Flights were cancelled for a few days, which would have been a major inconvenience and stress, but the …
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