Maybe there isn’t a direct link between the cosmology and practice. Directly trying to connect these may not be the most efficient way to express a spiritual vision of the universe. But I started this discussion with the question of how to tap into the flow of energy that overcomes physical disabilities and limitations. The question is not of eliminating such disabilities but making sure that they do not conquer the spirit. According to some teachers, physical disabilities may even be an expression of mental or spiritual weaknesses, and we certainly see a correlation between one’s mental and spiritual state and one’s degree of immunity to disease, and one’s ability to surmount disease.

As mentioned, what does not appeal to me is development of will power, as something individuated from the cosmic. I would rather draw from the cosmic, align myself with it, and in the terms of Indian spirituality this is known as bhakti. Bhakti is usually towards ishwara, or God with attributes. There is also bhakti towards the cosmic without attributes, though this is conceived of as more difficult. It can also easily take on an intellectual veneer. I wonder if I can find in India a school that practices bhakti towards the absolute without attributes, with which I can feel comfortable? or maybe I should look elsewhere? In Buddhism, the Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh, there is the concept of interbeing, of non-separation, the idea that all beings are related to each other in their essence. This isn’t a theism, but an ecological view of the universe. A view that things do not have a separate existence. In Buddhism, and other spiritual perspectives, without theism, the field of interest is shifted away from the egoistic context to awareness of the whole. Rather than a judgmental and critical view of the world, there is direct awareness, which includes within its vision also the interrelation of all things.

The above worldview is not one of bhakti, exactly, but of appreciation. It is not the worship of the God-spirit in all things, but mindfulness of the interdependence of all things. No thing can exist independantly, but requires the presence of other things for its existence. Not only does the divine essence exist in all things, it also binds them together.

The urge is to ask how can I link myself to this energy, join this union, and usually I think we attempt that by joining some spiritual movement or sangha – but these are only surrogates. Joining oneself to the divine essence, or rather reaffirming the existing connection, is probably not something that offers security, a membership card, the sense of belonging to an elite group. However, if one truly succeeds, a feeling of fellowship, dissolving individual ego, should follow from it.

You are because I am

I am because you are

We are linked

Because of your poverty

I am rich

Because of your weakness

I am strong

Because of your crookedness

I am straight

Because of my health

You are diseased

And sometimes the tables are turned

Weakness and strength are two positions on the same dial.

We are all brothers, brother.

Suffering heavily from my cold today, in its phase when it has moved mainly to the chest. My temperature is up to 37.6

On the other hand, after not eating Indian style food for 24 hours, I haven’t had a bowel movement.

I ate at lunch time in the German Bakery – a paneer burger. It came with salad, but I risked this anyway.

At my table I was joined by two German women but that made me uncomfortable since I had to try to hide my coughs a little.

Then I took a long slow walk along the river towards Sivananda Jhula, since I wanted to take a picture of S. Sivananda’s Swargashram sadhana kutir. I discovered that just next to the kutir there is a way down to the river, where there is a wide expanse of grey sand and large boulders where it would be possible to sit and spend a pleasant afternoon. All the mugginess of the Rishikesh air leaves you when you go down directly to the river itself. Sitting there I thought that Sivananda may have once sat upon the same rock.

Then there was the long slow walk back, which took all my energy. I stopped at a chai wallah’s booth for a chai. He told me how he offers cool water for free also to pilgrims along the way.

The water was kept in pots that he surrounded with cool wet cloths.

I stopped at J’s hostel o say hello, then stayed to drink a bottle of Mazaa mango juice – I drank it down disappointingly quickly. There was another girl at the hostel who seems to have the same symptoms as me, though she says that the fever has come more recently than the cough.

I came back upto the room and lay down for a while. It took a long time to calm my breathing so I wasn’t coughng all the time. But then I slept for a while. Now a slight burning sensation in my mouth is evidence of the slightly higher temperature that has come on this afternoon.

I wonder about disease and the fighting of it. Men like Sivananda lived under impossibly difficult conditions, despite all kinds of physical problems. Sivananda used to rise and do japa in the icy cold river before dawn in winter, and lived almost without food. The only explanation for it is the power of spiritual force or mental energy – the power of will. I wonder at this applicttion of will power. Sivananda’s books are all about the development of will power, and somehow this has never appealed to me, at least, in the way that I have understood it. I would much rather imagine connecting myself to the flow of energy in the whole universe, than imagine myself struggling in an individual way, to develop my will power. That approach is given legitimacy under Sivananda’s system, under the auspices of bhakti. But then, I have not sufficiently developed my approach to bhakti, since I no longer, if ever, felt truly comfortable with a deity, Ishwara, or whatever. It seems to me that if I want to connect myself to the cosmic force, I have to develop a better familiarity with it. I think Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings may hold a key to that.

In Shantaram I encountered the philosophy which he called Resolution Theory, which seemed to me like a poorer version of a similar philosophy that one encounters in yoga, perhaps in Krishnananda’s writings, according to which the universe began in a single vibration, where power in potential gave expression to itself and began a process of individuation, division and separation. A widening complexity, where particles divide and re-unite with particles to form new structures. Each particle carries within it the seed of its essential nature, which is the primary, unindividuated essence. As the products of creation grow more complex, there is a rise in individuated intelligence, reaching through the plant and animal kingdoms towards man. Man is the only entity capable of perceiving himself as an entity that is individuated from the whole. This carries the danger that he will act in an egoistic way that will bring about the destruction of other species and ultimately himself. But man carries also the ability to understand and reunite with his essence, the unindividuated whole. And, in as much as the universe is becoming ever more complex and separating further from its origin, it is, at the same time, striving to reach back to its point of origin. The understanding of this process is the school through which all of kife is being self educated, and it is the school that human beings are intended to travel. One of the chief classrooms or subjects for learning is that of suffering, since suffering is always the expression of an individual who has not understood his place in the universe: has not understood that he is in fact united with all beings, or rather, his true identity is the common seed that exists in all beings. That common seed is not subject to disease, death or destruction.

Another subject for learning is love, since in love we come to give more value to the welfare of other creatures than we do to our selves, and the urge towards self-preservation is one of the strongest forces and instincts that all creatures possess. The upanishads say that we love others on account of the self. That is, because of the seed or essence that is within us, we are able to reach out to the seed or essence that is in another being.

In making choices in life, we should choose the paths that bring us closer to learning our true identity and reuniting with it. It is not, as Khaderbhai says in Shantaram, the movement towards greater complexity that it is important to emulate and encourage, but the parallel movement in all creation towards understanding the underlying essence of that complexity. The universe wants to reunite with itself. In man, it finally has an opportunity. In all of creation, only man has the ability to reintegrate. Spiritual masters, prophets and saints have managed this, and are the inspiration for us. Their statements on the subject are not without problems, paradoxes and contradictions, but we must understand that the attempt that they are making is by definition super-human – they are attempting to transcend their human nature and reach a level of conscious being that is at the essence of all life and its evolutionary process. So we should forgive the saints and sages sometimes for their arrogance, mutual rivalry, delusions of grandeur and the rest.

My challenge, after having affirmed this cosmology, is how to move within it. And this has been my primary stumbling block. It seems to me that I have not made significant progress, and I really need to do so, otherwise, by my own thinking, my life will have been a waste. How to put this cosmology into practice? or at least make its realization stronger?

Finished Shantaram, a very good book, with a Bollywood style ability to invoke every possible emotion, but also full of profound reflections upon life and our position in the universe. I think it deserves to be taken in a non-judgmental way, as the reflection of one man’s experience.

Before surrendering the book to the next reader – someone at J’s hostel – I thought to copy out a few key passages. I wonder whether this has a real purpose. If I don’t get everything the first time, is there a reason to hope that there is a chance to learn more? Still, when reading a novel, one doesn’t always read with a close attention to detail, and there are plenty of opportunities to glide over important points, so here goes:

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fae keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

Resolution theory – about how the universe is always moving towards complexity – Idriss

You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and comletely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.

Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. ut I don’t any more. So no – I guess I’m not an anarchist now.

The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men, he said. It is the deeds that that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The tuth is that we are al, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving towards God.

There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now.

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

The night passed restlessly with many dreams, from which I kept awaking in confusion. This is often the case when there is a fever. It’s not a high fever, 37.4, but was enough to disturb my sleep. Today my cold came on stronger, just as I expected it to do. I think the runny nose will give up tomorrow or the next day and I will be left with an annoying cough. I hope the cold does not slip too deeply onto my chest.

So, dealing with the cold, I have spent the day reading, after doing email for an hour in mid morning. That was mostly reading through and responding to Dorit’s long letter about the changes in the village, her developing connection with Making the Impossible Possible and other things. I still have to write to my parents.

Occasionally my thoughts stray to the meaning of my stay here in Rishikesh and whether to depart from here, when I am better, to some other town. Or maybe I will just move to another hotel in Rishikesh itself. Here, I have been meeting mostly Israelis, which don’t really interest me, and I don’t really interest them – especially since most of them are young. What’s for sure is that after J departs from here I will be pretty much by myself. Anyway, for now, I think I am right in taking it easy and letting my cold settle.

I am feeling a vague antagonism to the Indian street scene: the filth in the road, the boisterous taxi drivers, the untrustworthy food, and all the raucous sounds and friendly-rudeness of Indians. Perhaps the only way to accept all this is through the rose-tinted eyes of foreign tourists and pilgrims, or the callous familiarity of those who are native to this country. Despite my long interest in all things Indian, and respect for the country’s spiritual culture, I don’t fit into either category. I cannot help but look critically on what I see. On the other hand I appreciate the people too.

I suppose the aim of a stranger should be to treat people with respect, and awaken empathy, where that is possible. I have to work on my Hindi.

The ceremonies and rituals are pretty. I find myself singing the songs and bhajans. They make me feel peaceful. But they are not the essence. To get caught up in that world is very attractive but what it offers is an alternative to emotional wisdom, human love and even spiritual truth. There is no such easy replacement to these things. What one can learn from relationship with human beings unversed in religion is usually greater than from reading of books by saints. What one can learn from listening to one’s own heart can be greater than the teachings of gurus and spiritual masters. All we can learn from them, perhaps is the validity and the legitimacy of listening, watching and learning by ourselves, in our own way.

Yesterday we did not succeed in going to Rishikesh but instead got stuck in the vilage of KarnPrayag due to a road bock up ahead. We spent sevreal hours waiting by the police office at the beginning of the village. Then there was a rumour that the road had opened so we drove out to where the land slide had closed the road. Jonatan went on ahead to see the situation and reported a very large amount of sand and rocks blocking the road. We came back to Karnprayag and found a hotel that accommodated all of us. A Sikh fellow asked to share the room with us since there was no room left for him. I had mixed feeling about sharing a room and bed with this guy but it wasnt as awful as it might have been. We had thali in a restaurant together with the other Sikh man and his daughter. His daughter is studying dentistry.

This morning we were woken up early by the driver who said the road is open, so we all got up quickly. Maybe not everyone got out quickly enough since I have time to write this. It’s been an hour since we were woken up. Someone told us last night that the road would be closed by police order from 7.00, which is just a few minutes away.

Evening

Well, when we reached the road, of course, we found it closed, but a bulldozer was hard at work clearing the obstruction. And eventually it opened and we got through. Then began the rest of the long journey home.

The trip up north wasnt a great success. Most of the time we were cold and wet and we have both caught colds I think. I am not sure what the trip, so far, has done for our relationship. It’s been kind of strange. Jonathan has taken the lead and I’ve been kind of passive, letting him check out hotels and that kind of thing. Maybe that’s been good for him. On the other hand, I also haven’t been very expressive, and he hasn’t been able to read me, and occasionally he has had to ask me what I am feeling. I guess he would like to see a bit more enthusiasm. I have been a bit selfish. I am selfish, and restrained. That’s the truth. I’m not very open or adventurous. But what can I do – like in the poem that Dorit sent me, I have to accept myself as I am. But, as I answered, I am not sure that how I think I am is how I really am. That’s true for all of us.

Now the rain has come on again. I guess I won’t be sitting with J and his friends at the hostel this evening. The monsoon seems to be at its height. On the way down there was just so much destruction. One landslide had blocked the road for us, but a thousand others had left boulders and rubble scattered all over the road. Sometimes completely blocking the side of the road nearest the mountain, at other times leaving an obstacle course that we had to weave between. The force of nature in the Himalayas makes a mockery of human handiwork, and it is not just because this is a poor third world country. Now the rain is a torrent, and we can be sure that tonight will bring still more destruction to the roads north of Rishikesh.

Personal Sadhana

Of course, some yoga practice and meditation is good, but the emphasis should be upon mindfulness throughout the day. I spend half an hour in meditation, but 16 or 17 hours getting about my daily business. In those hours I should be alert and aware of the world and my reactions, and my inner world too – what possesses my mind.

The ceremonies of the hindus are very beautiful – the chanting, the pujas and arati. No doubt they put people in touch with the soul, and elements that would be forgotten in daily activities. However, I am not sure that they are sufficient to maintain a state of mindful awareness, such as Buddhist teachers speak of. Naturally the practice advocated by Sivananda and others did not stop with daily meditation, swadhyaya, ceremonies and satsang. But by placing an emphasis more on these activities, and then perhaps forgettng them, there is a danger that practice will become ritualized.

We got up at 4.30 in order to get down quickly to GovindGhat and made it down by around 9.15. Now we are waiting for our taxi to fill up.

It was much quicker going down of course, and the only event for me was being knocked over by a horse, or rather by the load it carried. My head landed comfortably in a patch of mud between two rocks, so I escaped with only a scratch.

Because our shoes were so wet, this was a bit hard on the feet, so I bought and changed into a pair of slippers down in GovindGhat.

It’s a pity really that we spent so much time rushing along the way, both on the 13 kilometer way up to Gangharia and the 3 kilometer way up to the Valley of Flowers, because the landscape here is really amazing, particularly the mountain torrents. The vegetation is also very beautiful, even without flowers, with mossy trees and many varieties of shrubs. Among the most prevalent are nettles and hemp. Yonatan got stung by a nettle and I showed him how to use dock to take away the sting.