Mere Thought
{So if you've used a computer you may have experienced times where an entire email was deleted (project, movie, word document ect.) so I can feel your compassion already for my last post forgotten. I had a great post about Tibet but was taken away, dematerialized, shining as it went. Prepare for the re-hash}
When I was at Namso lake there was a tremendous meteor shower. The altitude there is about 4500 meteres so the view of the stars is nearly what an astronaut must see. The first day was spent getting used to the lack of air, gasping at times. I honestly had the feeling, quite a few times, that I was going to die. Not scary dying, but like a slow drown where you karmatically realize an end. I would feel as though I were about to pass out or go to sleep, but even if I laid down I would gasp and feel the phosphenes fill my eyes, and have the feeling of dying. I did not die, however. I lived on through the day and went swimming.
I met a group of people in Lhasa that were also going to Namso lake and the horse-racing festival in Damsun so on the morning of two days after my last post we rented a bus to take us. I had heard much about the festivals of Tibet. "Tibetan Woodstock" was a term that I had heard them coined, so of course I was excited about getting out of Lhasa (which turned out to be an overpriced dirt-city with angry Chinese and sad beggars strewn through the streets, wearily confused about the situation, hungry beside the endless brothels that distort the tourist's view of this religiously high spiritual paradise of infinite peace and knowledge still pretending it is for the sake of conscience and credit card and the endless pictures that they'll show they're family and friends for new-age karma points earned by ego defining precisely the paradox of peace, war, irony, and contradiction that is invariably instilled into the human consciousness and civilization as we know it.) We left in a large van after much negotiation at the bus station with a Tibetan dude that sped along quite fast. The scenery became intensely beautiful with yaks and mountains and plains. The air is so thin that you can see almost infinitely far as the elevation is so high that the clouds move as though you were watching a time lapse movie (seriously strengthening my theory about clouds being conscious. Ok. Here it is. One day, as I lived in Florida I was looking up at the clouds and noticed a presence about them. Strangely, they were not just an object or vaporous H2O any longer, but a seemingly conscious entity and began to think about the possibility of different forms of consciousness that is completely unrecognizable to the human mind. Clouds consist of water and immense amounts of 'electricity' which can be definable in other ways such as light, 'psychic' energy, magnetic fields, negative and positive ions...(I would also like to state the unreliability of scientific characterization - that rationality leads to only a vague understanding. Think about Quantum Physics for a moment; the universe refuses to be defined. It really makes no sense in the traditional, 'rational' state of thinking. This paradox of the universe leads me to two theories:)
1. As I stated earlier, there is a possibility of types of consciousness that are imperceivable to us. Clouds have a tremendous, electrical matrix similar to the human brain (which is also a powerful electrical matrix operated through the conductivity of H2O). The only difference between these two is the fact our minds rely on a clumsy neurological connection, in which pathways have the possiblity of being severed and 'conscious' effort has to be put into the development of it's connections. Not so within clouds. There is, essentially, nothing stopping the conductivity between the molecules. Imagine now the scientifically supported theory that life (or strands of DNA) were created in the ocean through certain conditions and a bolt of lightning. I don't think I really have to explain all of the religious implications that this imposes. (By the way, The Buddha I believe was one of the first to realize our universe's relative nature - the fact that physics only appear the way it does because of our minds' weak classification and rationalization. 1700 years later Einstein is praised for his scientific analysis of the matter. Let's rule out the 'spiritual' aspect for now; conserving your view of my sanity)
So now, zoom way out until you can visualize stars and nebulae. A nebula is a cloud-like cluster of energy, gases and particles loosely bound together by electromagnetic fields. My theory remains the same for this. It could be possible that these clusters of matter and energy (including whole galaxies) are not just the 'definable' 'rational' structures that we would like to think. Thinking about matter and energy in terms of 'fate' is Newtonian at best (that everything will follow a predetermined path with no choice; an unchanging universe with physics remaining completely the same throughout.) This is untrue. The universe's physics are constantly changing and redefining. In the outer regions of space we notice that physics actually operate slightly different than they do in our solar system. Time, magnetism and gravity are always changing. What we think of as science is only a snapshot in the billions of years that the universe has existed. What we are studying now is just that - now. So, in conclusion, my first theory about why the universe refuses to be defined by science is that the universe is actually a conscious entity capable of refusing our attempts at discovery.
2. My second theory of why the universe refuses to be defined (by Quantum Physics) is that, somewhere, in the evolution of our scientific process we made an error, that, still allowed us to rationalize the studies, while being not 100% correct. Think about the Sumerians for a minute. The system of numbers they used were in 6's instead of 10's. This provided allowance and practicality, but not understanding. Even within modern sciences now there must be something we have overlooked because of standardization. Physics needed to be completely re-written in order to understand Quantum Physics. Perhaps something is still very askew. Like I stated in an earlier post, we only use 10% of our brains, see 5% of light and hear a fraction of sound. It's difficult for us to absorb understanding without rationalization. Back to Zen Buddhism, there is no rational at all. The fact is that our lives are an illusion and that everything is relative. Perhaps this so-called 'Enlightenment" is an understanding without rationality. An osmosis of understanding. Confucius say: if you know, you don't say, and if you say, then you don't know.
So back to the logical, rational, journey. It was me, Amir and Jackie (the Malaysian guy from Chengdu) that began by waking up at 6:00 in Lhasa to catch the bus to Damsun and Namso lake. When we were waiting for the bus to come we met another group that was also traveling to the horse-racing festival. We decided to rent a van together to bring down the cost so we took two taxis to the bus station. The group that we met consisted of two guys and a girl from Israel, a girl from Australia, and a older lady (maybe 60) from Canada, that was on her was to Nepal to take care of the Tibetan refuges and to meet the great Dali Lama. We found a great bus driver and were off. We stopped at a nice place to eat - a big tent in the middle of the Tibetan plains. It was the single greatest tent that I've ever been in. There were Buddhist tapestries on the walls, comfy couches and even a television. The food was excellent. It was cooked over a fire fueled by yak shit. That's right - the native American aspect of using every part of the animal (even the parts the animal doesn't even want). The houses are sometimes made of yak shit. It's quite the resource. In the fields you'll see great piles, intricately stacked and covered with tarps to preserve their shittiness. Getting back to Seriousland, though, the noodles, which had a burnt aroma, were really some excellent noodles. We continued our drive after a bit of Nepalese smoke that that the rastafarian Israeli offered up.
The drive was comfortable and I was reading the book 100 Years of Solitude which my mom gave me to read (thanks) and pausing to watch the scenery. The stereotypical snowcapped mountains were approaching quickly and the hills started slanting up and up. We made it to our destination finally, the town of the horse racing festival - the Great Damsun, which as our expectations were pummeling our minds, was a great big mud-crap-town. We got off the bus and walked through the town. It was two big ugly roads like a T that had various shops like industrial and mechanics with some restuarants and above all, brothels. Brothels to the left and brothels to the right. The spiritually ascending brothels of the Great Damsun with the Chinese whistling saying "What country? This is a Province!" Ugggghhhhhhh. So, as I was walking to the horse-racing festival later, I narrowly fell into one of the many open sewer pits that plague the city. Damsun had running water, bathrooms and storm drains but I think they just forgot to put caps on all of the manholes. Every one is about 20 feet deep and oftentimes flowing, which means that if you fell in one (which, oh my brothers, I swear to Bog in all his heaven I just about did), and you managed not to be killed by the terrible fall, you would certainly be quite scared being swept into the sewer river into blackness, the stench being unbearable. I've heard two stories about foreigners falling into manholes since I've been in Tibet and there probably are many more unreported stories of this phenomenon. (Open manholes are actually a reality in Xihuahuan too, where I live, in Datong.) We found a hotel with two rooms available with 4 beds apiece and walked over to the festival. It turned out to be some Tibetans among hordes of Chinese police. I would have considered it a war-zone if I was blindly placed into the situation. That's when the comparisons between the native Americans and Tibetans started.
The most participated-in activity was gambling. All forms of gambling. Pool tables, roulette wheels, cards, lotteries. Half of the Tibetans looked as though their souls were nearly gone, with one last breath of the life that they had known before. Imagine growing up in the middle of a range of mountains with just your immediate family and perhaps one other family miles and miles away being taught a lifestyle that integrated Tibetan Buddhism. When you're 4 years old you start working - herding animals and making yogurt - seamlessly replacing your dying mother and father. The objects in the family had been there over generations, as well as the ideas. I noticed, at Namso Lake, when I was caught in the eyes of a Tibetan, the pace of the culture moved slower than that of more developed countries. We looked at each other, but instead of instinctively looking away, I continued to look as he questioned. He began to smile, slowly, authentically until it was quite a nice grin because he saw the authenticism in my face. I felt that they were very grounded into reality. On the way back from Damsun, after we all realized that Damsun was a crap-town and we'd never go back, we stopped at our driver's family's house. It was a strong pad made out of the strongest stuff of the plains - the stuff of yaks. We got out of the car after 2 hours of driving and I was called over to a few gentlemen sitting on the grass enjoying beer after beer after beer until their enjoyment turned into an instilled addiction, hopefully making them forget all about the new railway and the cultural revolution that turned his country into a mutant conglomeration of mud towns smothered in gambling rings and brothels. (Doesn't this sound quite similar to the Plains Indians of America?) The railway is a new development with a projected completion date of 2006. The Dali Lama just wrote a book in India, where he has been exiled, which talks about the destruction of Tibet. He feels that the new railway is the centerpiece of atrocity, it being the mechanism to extract all the natural resources and money made from the many many tourists. It is said that the money made from this will be moved to the East coast, where development has skyrocketed. The terrible irony of this is that the Chinese hire Tibetan workers for little or no pay to build the railway, convinced of the idea of prosperity.
When I got off the van and streched I was called down to one of the drunken Tibetans and shook his hand for a long time. It was less of a handshake and more of a hand-hold, looking at each other as a greeting and smiling. After showing us his shrine and photos of the Dali Lama he invited us into the kitchen for yogurt. He told us that his wife had made it by hand from the milk of the many yaks that were eating grass around his house. I couldn't exactly figure out the family situation - it was about 7-8 people living together; from young children to elderlies. The yogurt was, hands-down, the most delicious I've ever had...(hold on one second - I need to side track for a second, whereby grounding the audience to my presence...I'm back in Lhasa staying at this youth hostel. It's a cool place with a basketball hoop, good music, a lounge area and bar with pool tables, free bicycles and free internet. It's great, except for the obligatory dirtiness that Lhasa requires. I'm sitting here, typing to my audience about yogurt and was, all of a sudden, scared out of my wits when I looked to my left and saw a gigantic rat running at me, balls-to-the-wall. I let out this sort of wussy-yell and pointed to it as it scurried across the floor and under my feet(no I didn't stand on my chair). I only had one person that heard this wussy-yell: the girl sitting next to me. Now, lets talk about her a bit. She's a comfortably-living Chinese chick with probably a husband in the military. There's a terribly racist attitude here in Lhasa that would make the deep south look like...look like...well, not so racist... There's a law here that prevents foreigners from staying in certain parts of the city. There's an unspoken Chinese decree that suggests the raising of all of the prices for foreigners. Get this - I went to the Great Buddha festival yesterday with the remainders of our 8 person group {some stayed at Namso Lake because of it's captivating beauty}. After we were first dropped off by the mini-bus we walked down this road for a few miles, accompanied by literally thousands upon thousands of active Buddhists, walked through this village and up and up this mountain, through a monastary and to the peak crest valley where the monks lived to see this great Tapestry of the Buddha where everyone was worshipping and throwing confetti and eating yogurt and drinking yak butter tea and sharing. The problem was, when we arrived at the stairway accending into the monastery there were these angry Chinese/Tibetans that were stopping foreigners (using force) and demanding 65 yuan a person. I saw the crappy-laminated badge of one of them that said, written in English "MONEY COLLECTOR".
Of course, I ducked my hat a bit and slipped right past them, but my friends weren't so lucky. I sat on the steps watching them get harassed and yelled at, specifically for the reason of the color of their skin. All the Chinese, of course, were allowed to attend this strictly-Buddhist festival, some showing unmerciful distaste. So the girl sitting next on the computer here in the youth hostel in Lhasa had that same shitty-smug I-don't-know-how-to-speak-English-because-I'm-not-a-dirty-Capitalist expression when I tried to tell her about the rat. For Chrissakes I'm trying as hard as I can to learn Chinese the 3 months that I've been here. Hold on though, I digress... it's not China. It's China at all, nor is it the Chinese Culture, [which is beautiful, wonderful] but it's TIBET. There's some great fear of Westerners here and a drive to get them out and I know it's because America takes a hard stance on human rights and is backed (kindof) by the U.N. in all it's decisions about who is right and who is wrong, completely forgetting the Theory of Relativity...)
So the yogurt was pantsplittingly good with us all eating away at the joy of the Tibetan family.
As we went into the festival, Amir and I split off, having a distaste for slow groups and made our way around the fairgrounds of terribleness. After passing the beggars, fake monks, prostitutes and gambling we made it to the tent place where Tibetans could be seen dancing in this circle. I met this Tibetan girl that could speak English really well (at the dismay of Amir who said later "She's more modern than I am. She probably even knows how to use a computer better.") Amir was a connect-to-nature kindof guy that emphasized the importance of the reality of the journey above the comfortability. He would rather stay in a tent than a hotel (which was crappy for him because that night, as the rest of the group was staying in a 20 yuan hotel with electric blankets on all the beds, he was sleeping in a tent with a hailstorm coming down....still; process of the journey...) So I asked (in all of my suaveness) if there was anything to do in this two-bit town and she said "Dancing". She then lead me into the Tibetan circle of dancing with the promise that she would 'teach me'. The Tibetans certainly weren't having any fun with this dance. They looked morose as though they were dancing zombies. Some of the Tibetan women tried to paint their dark faces pale, like the Chinese concubines, but ended up looking freakish, and well...zombieish. So now I was being thrust into this dance that sort of took on the feeling of a mild mosh-pit. The little terrible kids were pushing and shoving as I was trying to 'learn' this death-dance, all with a demonic smile on their face as the parents gave me grave looks of distrust and what-the-hell-are-you-doing-in-our-circle kindof look. The Tibetan girl that I had met was now on the sidelines of the circle, watching pensively. When the sullen rotation around the circle lead me back to her I said, "I thought you were going to teach me" and she said "I don't know how to dance" so I got out of there fast, still being pursued by some of these angrilians. Then a kind of semi-circle formed around the Tibetan girl and I... as I was trying to leave and she wanted to take a picture. After smiling nervously for the picture, with the eyes of 15 or so disapproving Tibetans staring, I went back to the hotel where I read some books, ate some snacks and went to sleep beautifully on the electric blanket.
Frank Santora was showing me some pieces of artwork that he had done. I would say, over the course of the dream, that I viewed about 200 pieces of art. Each time that I viewed one I would spiral into a situation that juxtaposed the feeling of the artwork. I remember walking in this familiar area with hills and sunlight coming through the trees with the comfortable houses of 'home'. Past relationships, music and people I'd met were quantified into these indescribable feelings, situations and stories, and then I would be back to view the next piece of art. Here's where the dream gets a little hairy, though. I could literally choose the artwork that I looked at. It was not completely random. If I liked the spiral-effect after viewing a piece, I could go back and look at the piece again. Like the retention of thought that I experienced in the toad-dream, I could literally hold a piece of art and analyze it indefinitely. Some of the pieces I can still recall but would never attempt to paint them for the purpose of dream-nostalgia. The dream built to a billowing emotion, intense connection to long-lost people, crossing bridges to my past, hearing music and going deeper.
The first lucid dream that I ever had began, as I was going to sleep, with a conscious effort to stay grounded during the dream so I could experience it first-hand. The trick is to meditate about dreaming as you're falling asleep, to stay connected. I'll tell you what though, that electric blanket was great for lucid dreaming. Sometime in my lifetime I'll create a perfect homeostasis chamber where one can experience inter-uterine memories during dreams.
So the first section of the dream was on ground experiencing imminent armageddon. Vibrant tornadoes and thinking clouds throwing down their lightning with the conscious thought of entering heaven (which paralleled the moment as I was entering sleep consciously). So I was in Heaven. I could tell that it was a floating city, a castle in the sky. There were playgrounds and parks, schools and friends. I learned that some of people that I knew on Earth didn't make it, which made Heaven imperfect. At night some of the long-lost people I'd met were there with me in a tree all lit up with phosphorescent animals and lights and our hands were glowing colors. Afterward, I left heaven, it still being an imperfect state, and made it to the the planet where God lived. Flying through space I passed by a planet where an inter-dimensional competetion was commencing with two groups of beings. The procession stopped as they turned to look at me. (this also happened outside of a dream for me when I was in a field meditating. I entered into the realm of the Gods where I could see Vishnu or Shiva or Brahma or one of those dudes, vibrant, incredibly real, across a plane of golden space, with all of the mini-gods around him all composing the same music and heaven and oneness. As I broke through the spectral-plane and looked through the oneness and music stopped and they paused and looked at me to ask with their great eyes what the hell I was doing there. {He reached for the secret too soon}) So the alien beings having the competition in outer-space also gave me this grave look so I continued on to the planet where God lived. Where I arrived and how I arrived was unknown because of how long it took. It was the representation of endlessness. I was in this great forrest with blades of grass the size of trees and the trees the size of infinity. As I walked into this place further and further, the trees and plants became bigger and bigger. The more I walked in, the more I wasn't conscious. I was experiencing, but not experiencing laterally. I walked in deeper and deeper until the forest was everything and there was a bright white light coming from behind the trees. I can still remember the face of God, but perhaps it was my own creativity, because at that point I was almost non-existent.)
So the stage I am right now with my money is still a little iffy. I was supposed to get the money wired into my friend's Chinese bank account but there was a problem. The China bank in Datong had different deposit methods or something than the China bank of Lhasa so the information that I provided to Anna, the college's secretary, whom is depositing the 4000 RMB, was not enough. For some reason they needed the address of the bank here, even though the guy at the bank today, angry at me because I was a foreigner, told me that the account information was enough because the accounts are universal [which made total sense, but if you recall the 'rot' incident I had with the bank-teller in Datong a few months ago, you'll agree that they can be a bit retarded]. So I gave Anna all the information she said that she needed so the transaction should be commencing soon. I hope. I met this fellow named Ryan who created a group of crazy young go-getters. The group consists of an Arab-American guy named Ahmed whom I engaged into a good conversation about music, art and the Communist shadow over Tibet. Ryan, whom I have already spoken of is a slim, Bill Gatesy-type engineering major from California who, like me, studies cosmology in his spare time. We were standing outside of Snowlands, the travel company that we're renting the Land Rover from, and waiting for the last piece of our group. His name was Mike. After hearing some wild stories about him, he appeared, with a cane and a beatie in his mouth, talking about the disintegration of Tibet a mile-a-minute. The odd story about him is that he pulled the driver aside talking to him about avoiding border customs of Nepal in order to smuggle past the 16 carpets that he had purchased in Lhasa. Ryan and Ahmed are both pretty sketched out by his flagrant hidden agendaism, but I think it will add a great new texture of absurdity to the already wild journey.
Ok, I believe that's enough literature for one day, students. Tommorrow will commense with a non-space theory and more about Amir and our star-lit adventures of Namso Lake. Keep it "real".
When I was at Namso lake there was a tremendous meteor shower. The altitude there is about 4500 meteres so the view of the stars is nearly what an astronaut must see. The first day was spent getting used to the lack of air, gasping at times. I honestly had the feeling, quite a few times, that I was going to die. Not scary dying, but like a slow drown where you karmatically realize an end. I would feel as though I were about to pass out or go to sleep, but even if I laid down I would gasp and feel the phosphenes fill my eyes, and have the feeling of dying. I did not die, however. I lived on through the day and went swimming.
I met a group of people in Lhasa that were also going to Namso lake and the horse-racing festival in Damsun so on the morning of two days after my last post we rented a bus to take us. I had heard much about the festivals of Tibet. "Tibetan Woodstock" was a term that I had heard them coined, so of course I was excited about getting out of Lhasa (which turned out to be an overpriced dirt-city with angry Chinese and sad beggars strewn through the streets, wearily confused about the situation, hungry beside the endless brothels that distort the tourist's view of this religiously high spiritual paradise of infinite peace and knowledge still pretending it is for the sake of conscience and credit card and the endless pictures that they'll show they're family and friends for new-age karma points earned by ego defining precisely the paradox of peace, war, irony, and contradiction that is invariably instilled into the human consciousness and civilization as we know it.) We left in a large van after much negotiation at the bus station with a Tibetan dude that sped along quite fast. The scenery became intensely beautiful with yaks and mountains and plains. The air is so thin that you can see almost infinitely far as the elevation is so high that the clouds move as though you were watching a time lapse movie (seriously strengthening my theory about clouds being conscious. Ok. Here it is. One day, as I lived in Florida I was looking up at the clouds and noticed a presence about them. Strangely, they were not just an object or vaporous H2O any longer, but a seemingly conscious entity and began to think about the possibility of different forms of consciousness that is completely unrecognizable to the human mind. Clouds consist of water and immense amounts of 'electricity' which can be definable in other ways such as light, 'psychic' energy, magnetic fields, negative and positive ions...(I would also like to state the unreliability of scientific characterization - that rationality leads to only a vague understanding. Think about Quantum Physics for a moment; the universe refuses to be defined. It really makes no sense in the traditional, 'rational' state of thinking. This paradox of the universe leads me to two theories:)
1. As I stated earlier, there is a possibility of types of consciousness that are imperceivable to us. Clouds have a tremendous, electrical matrix similar to the human brain (which is also a powerful electrical matrix operated through the conductivity of H2O). The only difference between these two is the fact our minds rely on a clumsy neurological connection, in which pathways have the possiblity of being severed and 'conscious' effort has to be put into the development of it's connections. Not so within clouds. There is, essentially, nothing stopping the conductivity between the molecules. Imagine now the scientifically supported theory that life (or strands of DNA) were created in the ocean through certain conditions and a bolt of lightning. I don't think I really have to explain all of the religious implications that this imposes. (By the way, The Buddha I believe was one of the first to realize our universe's relative nature - the fact that physics only appear the way it does because of our minds' weak classification and rationalization. 1700 years later Einstein is praised for his scientific analysis of the matter. Let's rule out the 'spiritual' aspect for now; conserving your view of my sanity)
So now, zoom way out until you can visualize stars and nebulae. A nebula is a cloud-like cluster of energy, gases and particles loosely bound together by electromagnetic fields. My theory remains the same for this. It could be possible that these clusters of matter and energy (including whole galaxies) are not just the 'definable' 'rational' structures that we would like to think. Thinking about matter and energy in terms of 'fate' is Newtonian at best (that everything will follow a predetermined path with no choice; an unchanging universe with physics remaining completely the same throughout.) This is untrue. The universe's physics are constantly changing and redefining. In the outer regions of space we notice that physics actually operate slightly different than they do in our solar system. Time, magnetism and gravity are always changing. What we think of as science is only a snapshot in the billions of years that the universe has existed. What we are studying now is just that - now. So, in conclusion, my first theory about why the universe refuses to be defined by science is that the universe is actually a conscious entity capable of refusing our attempts at discovery.
2. My second theory of why the universe refuses to be defined (by Quantum Physics) is that, somewhere, in the evolution of our scientific process we made an error, that, still allowed us to rationalize the studies, while being not 100% correct. Think about the Sumerians for a minute. The system of numbers they used were in 6's instead of 10's. This provided allowance and practicality, but not understanding. Even within modern sciences now there must be something we have overlooked because of standardization. Physics needed to be completely re-written in order to understand Quantum Physics. Perhaps something is still very askew. Like I stated in an earlier post, we only use 10% of our brains, see 5% of light and hear a fraction of sound. It's difficult for us to absorb understanding without rationalization. Back to Zen Buddhism, there is no rational at all. The fact is that our lives are an illusion and that everything is relative. Perhaps this so-called 'Enlightenment" is an understanding without rationality. An osmosis of understanding. Confucius say: if you know, you don't say, and if you say, then you don't know.
So back to the logical, rational, journey. It was me, Amir and Jackie (the Malaysian guy from Chengdu) that began by waking up at 6:00 in Lhasa to catch the bus to Damsun and Namso lake. When we were waiting for the bus to come we met another group that was also traveling to the horse-racing festival. We decided to rent a van together to bring down the cost so we took two taxis to the bus station. The group that we met consisted of two guys and a girl from Israel, a girl from Australia, and a older lady (maybe 60) from Canada, that was on her was to Nepal to take care of the Tibetan refuges and to meet the great Dali Lama. We found a great bus driver and were off. We stopped at a nice place to eat - a big tent in the middle of the Tibetan plains. It was the single greatest tent that I've ever been in. There were Buddhist tapestries on the walls, comfy couches and even a television. The food was excellent. It was cooked over a fire fueled by yak shit. That's right - the native American aspect of using every part of the animal (even the parts the animal doesn't even want). The houses are sometimes made of yak shit. It's quite the resource. In the fields you'll see great piles, intricately stacked and covered with tarps to preserve their shittiness. Getting back to Seriousland, though, the noodles, which had a burnt aroma, were really some excellent noodles. We continued our drive after a bit of Nepalese smoke that that the rastafarian Israeli offered up.
The drive was comfortable and I was reading the book 100 Years of Solitude which my mom gave me to read (thanks) and pausing to watch the scenery. The stereotypical snowcapped mountains were approaching quickly and the hills started slanting up and up. We made it to our destination finally, the town of the horse racing festival - the Great Damsun, which as our expectations were pummeling our minds, was a great big mud-crap-town. We got off the bus and walked through the town. It was two big ugly roads like a T that had various shops like industrial and mechanics with some restuarants and above all, brothels. Brothels to the left and brothels to the right. The spiritually ascending brothels of the Great Damsun with the Chinese whistling saying "What country? This is a Province!" Ugggghhhhhhh. So, as I was walking to the horse-racing festival later, I narrowly fell into one of the many open sewer pits that plague the city. Damsun had running water, bathrooms and storm drains but I think they just forgot to put caps on all of the manholes. Every one is about 20 feet deep and oftentimes flowing, which means that if you fell in one (which, oh my brothers, I swear to Bog in all his heaven I just about did), and you managed not to be killed by the terrible fall, you would certainly be quite scared being swept into the sewer river into blackness, the stench being unbearable. I've heard two stories about foreigners falling into manholes since I've been in Tibet and there probably are many more unreported stories of this phenomenon. (Open manholes are actually a reality in Xihuahuan too, where I live, in Datong.) We found a hotel with two rooms available with 4 beds apiece and walked over to the festival. It turned out to be some Tibetans among hordes of Chinese police. I would have considered it a war-zone if I was blindly placed into the situation. That's when the comparisons between the native Americans and Tibetans started.
The most participated-in activity was gambling. All forms of gambling. Pool tables, roulette wheels, cards, lotteries. Half of the Tibetans looked as though their souls were nearly gone, with one last breath of the life that they had known before. Imagine growing up in the middle of a range of mountains with just your immediate family and perhaps one other family miles and miles away being taught a lifestyle that integrated Tibetan Buddhism. When you're 4 years old you start working - herding animals and making yogurt - seamlessly replacing your dying mother and father. The objects in the family had been there over generations, as well as the ideas. I noticed, at Namso Lake, when I was caught in the eyes of a Tibetan, the pace of the culture moved slower than that of more developed countries. We looked at each other, but instead of instinctively looking away, I continued to look as he questioned. He began to smile, slowly, authentically until it was quite a nice grin because he saw the authenticism in my face. I felt that they were very grounded into reality. On the way back from Damsun, after we all realized that Damsun was a crap-town and we'd never go back, we stopped at our driver's family's house. It was a strong pad made out of the strongest stuff of the plains - the stuff of yaks. We got out of the car after 2 hours of driving and I was called over to a few gentlemen sitting on the grass enjoying beer after beer after beer until their enjoyment turned into an instilled addiction, hopefully making them forget all about the new railway and the cultural revolution that turned his country into a mutant conglomeration of mud towns smothered in gambling rings and brothels. (Doesn't this sound quite similar to the Plains Indians of America?) The railway is a new development with a projected completion date of 2006. The Dali Lama just wrote a book in India, where he has been exiled, which talks about the destruction of Tibet. He feels that the new railway is the centerpiece of atrocity, it being the mechanism to extract all the natural resources and money made from the many many tourists. It is said that the money made from this will be moved to the East coast, where development has skyrocketed. The terrible irony of this is that the Chinese hire Tibetan workers for little or no pay to build the railway, convinced of the idea of prosperity.
When I got off the van and streched I was called down to one of the drunken Tibetans and shook his hand for a long time. It was less of a handshake and more of a hand-hold, looking at each other as a greeting and smiling. After showing us his shrine and photos of the Dali Lama he invited us into the kitchen for yogurt. He told us that his wife had made it by hand from the milk of the many yaks that were eating grass around his house. I couldn't exactly figure out the family situation - it was about 7-8 people living together; from young children to elderlies. The yogurt was, hands-down, the most delicious I've ever had...(hold on one second - I need to side track for a second, whereby grounding the audience to my presence...I'm back in Lhasa staying at this youth hostel. It's a cool place with a basketball hoop, good music, a lounge area and bar with pool tables, free bicycles and free internet. It's great, except for the obligatory dirtiness that Lhasa requires. I'm sitting here, typing to my audience about yogurt and was, all of a sudden, scared out of my wits when I looked to my left and saw a gigantic rat running at me, balls-to-the-wall. I let out this sort of wussy-yell and pointed to it as it scurried across the floor and under my feet(no I didn't stand on my chair). I only had one person that heard this wussy-yell: the girl sitting next to me. Now, lets talk about her a bit. She's a comfortably-living Chinese chick with probably a husband in the military. There's a terribly racist attitude here in Lhasa that would make the deep south look like...look like...well, not so racist... There's a law here that prevents foreigners from staying in certain parts of the city. There's an unspoken Chinese decree that suggests the raising of all of the prices for foreigners. Get this - I went to the Great Buddha festival yesterday with the remainders of our 8 person group {some stayed at Namso Lake because of it's captivating beauty}. After we were first dropped off by the mini-bus we walked down this road for a few miles, accompanied by literally thousands upon thousands of active Buddhists, walked through this village and up and up this mountain, through a monastary and to the peak crest valley where the monks lived to see this great Tapestry of the Buddha where everyone was worshipping and throwing confetti and eating yogurt and drinking yak butter tea and sharing. The problem was, when we arrived at the stairway accending into the monastery there were these angry Chinese/Tibetans that were stopping foreigners (using force) and demanding 65 yuan a person. I saw the crappy-laminated badge of one of them that said, written in English "MONEY COLLECTOR".
Of course, I ducked my hat a bit and slipped right past them, but my friends weren't so lucky. I sat on the steps watching them get harassed and yelled at, specifically for the reason of the color of their skin. All the Chinese, of course, were allowed to attend this strictly-Buddhist festival, some showing unmerciful distaste. So the girl sitting next on the computer here in the youth hostel in Lhasa had that same shitty-smug I-don't-know-how-to-speak-English-because-I'm-not-a-dirty-Capitalist expression when I tried to tell her about the rat. For Chrissakes I'm trying as hard as I can to learn Chinese the 3 months that I've been here. Hold on though, I digress... it's not China. It's China at all, nor is it the Chinese Culture, [which is beautiful, wonderful] but it's TIBET. There's some great fear of Westerners here and a drive to get them out and I know it's because America takes a hard stance on human rights and is backed (kindof) by the U.N. in all it's decisions about who is right and who is wrong, completely forgetting the Theory of Relativity...)
So the yogurt was pantsplittingly good with us all eating away at the joy of the Tibetan family.
As we went into the festival, Amir and I split off, having a distaste for slow groups and made our way around the fairgrounds of terribleness. After passing the beggars, fake monks, prostitutes and gambling we made it to the tent place where Tibetans could be seen dancing in this circle. I met this Tibetan girl that could speak English really well (at the dismay of Amir who said later "She's more modern than I am. She probably even knows how to use a computer better.") Amir was a connect-to-nature kindof guy that emphasized the importance of the reality of the journey above the comfortability. He would rather stay in a tent than a hotel (which was crappy for him because that night, as the rest of the group was staying in a 20 yuan hotel with electric blankets on all the beds, he was sleeping in a tent with a hailstorm coming down....still; process of the journey...) So I asked (in all of my suaveness) if there was anything to do in this two-bit town and she said "Dancing". She then lead me into the Tibetan circle of dancing with the promise that she would 'teach me'. The Tibetans certainly weren't having any fun with this dance. They looked morose as though they were dancing zombies. Some of the Tibetan women tried to paint their dark faces pale, like the Chinese concubines, but ended up looking freakish, and well...zombieish. So now I was being thrust into this dance that sort of took on the feeling of a mild mosh-pit. The little terrible kids were pushing and shoving as I was trying to 'learn' this death-dance, all with a demonic smile on their face as the parents gave me grave looks of distrust and what-the-hell-are-you-doing-in-our-circle kindof look. The Tibetan girl that I had met was now on the sidelines of the circle, watching pensively. When the sullen rotation around the circle lead me back to her I said, "I thought you were going to teach me" and she said "I don't know how to dance" so I got out of there fast, still being pursued by some of these angrilians. Then a kind of semi-circle formed around the Tibetan girl and I... as I was trying to leave and she wanted to take a picture. After smiling nervously for the picture, with the eyes of 15 or so disapproving Tibetans staring, I went back to the hotel where I read some books, ate some snacks and went to sleep beautifully on the electric blanket.
Frank Santora was showing me some pieces of artwork that he had done. I would say, over the course of the dream, that I viewed about 200 pieces of art. Each time that I viewed one I would spiral into a situation that juxtaposed the feeling of the artwork. I remember walking in this familiar area with hills and sunlight coming through the trees with the comfortable houses of 'home'. Past relationships, music and people I'd met were quantified into these indescribable feelings, situations and stories, and then I would be back to view the next piece of art. Here's where the dream gets a little hairy, though. I could literally choose the artwork that I looked at. It was not completely random. If I liked the spiral-effect after viewing a piece, I could go back and look at the piece again. Like the retention of thought that I experienced in the toad-dream, I could literally hold a piece of art and analyze it indefinitely. Some of the pieces I can still recall but would never attempt to paint them for the purpose of dream-nostalgia. The dream built to a billowing emotion, intense connection to long-lost people, crossing bridges to my past, hearing music and going deeper.
The first lucid dream that I ever had began, as I was going to sleep, with a conscious effort to stay grounded during the dream so I could experience it first-hand. The trick is to meditate about dreaming as you're falling asleep, to stay connected. I'll tell you what though, that electric blanket was great for lucid dreaming. Sometime in my lifetime I'll create a perfect homeostasis chamber where one can experience inter-uterine memories during dreams.
So the first section of the dream was on ground experiencing imminent armageddon. Vibrant tornadoes and thinking clouds throwing down their lightning with the conscious thought of entering heaven (which paralleled the moment as I was entering sleep consciously). So I was in Heaven. I could tell that it was a floating city, a castle in the sky. There were playgrounds and parks, schools and friends. I learned that some of people that I knew on Earth didn't make it, which made Heaven imperfect. At night some of the long-lost people I'd met were there with me in a tree all lit up with phosphorescent animals and lights and our hands were glowing colors. Afterward, I left heaven, it still being an imperfect state, and made it to the the planet where God lived. Flying through space I passed by a planet where an inter-dimensional competetion was commencing with two groups of beings. The procession stopped as they turned to look at me. (this also happened outside of a dream for me when I was in a field meditating. I entered into the realm of the Gods where I could see Vishnu or Shiva or Brahma or one of those dudes, vibrant, incredibly real, across a plane of golden space, with all of the mini-gods around him all composing the same music and heaven and oneness. As I broke through the spectral-plane and looked through the oneness and music stopped and they paused and looked at me to ask with their great eyes what the hell I was doing there. {He reached for the secret too soon}) So the alien beings having the competition in outer-space also gave me this grave look so I continued on to the planet where God lived. Where I arrived and how I arrived was unknown because of how long it took. It was the representation of endlessness. I was in this great forrest with blades of grass the size of trees and the trees the size of infinity. As I walked into this place further and further, the trees and plants became bigger and bigger. The more I walked in, the more I wasn't conscious. I was experiencing, but not experiencing laterally. I walked in deeper and deeper until the forest was everything and there was a bright white light coming from behind the trees. I can still remember the face of God, but perhaps it was my own creativity, because at that point I was almost non-existent.)
So the stage I am right now with my money is still a little iffy. I was supposed to get the money wired into my friend's Chinese bank account but there was a problem. The China bank in Datong had different deposit methods or something than the China bank of Lhasa so the information that I provided to Anna, the college's secretary, whom is depositing the 4000 RMB, was not enough. For some reason they needed the address of the bank here, even though the guy at the bank today, angry at me because I was a foreigner, told me that the account information was enough because the accounts are universal [which made total sense, but if you recall the 'rot' incident I had with the bank-teller in Datong a few months ago, you'll agree that they can be a bit retarded]. So I gave Anna all the information she said that she needed so the transaction should be commencing soon. I hope. I met this fellow named Ryan who created a group of crazy young go-getters. The group consists of an Arab-American guy named Ahmed whom I engaged into a good conversation about music, art and the Communist shadow over Tibet. Ryan, whom I have already spoken of is a slim, Bill Gatesy-type engineering major from California who, like me, studies cosmology in his spare time. We were standing outside of Snowlands, the travel company that we're renting the Land Rover from, and waiting for the last piece of our group. His name was Mike. After hearing some wild stories about him, he appeared, with a cane and a beatie in his mouth, talking about the disintegration of Tibet a mile-a-minute. The odd story about him is that he pulled the driver aside talking to him about avoiding border customs of Nepal in order to smuggle past the 16 carpets that he had purchased in Lhasa. Ryan and Ahmed are both pretty sketched out by his flagrant hidden agendaism, but I think it will add a great new texture of absurdity to the already wild journey.
Ok, I believe that's enough literature for one day, students. Tommorrow will commense with a non-space theory and more about Amir and our star-lit adventures of Namso Lake. Keep it "real".