The End!

Hey there everybody. This is my last post about India, as I am writing it from the comfort of my very own room in San Diego. It's 5am, I'm jetlagged and cultureshocked, but I want to try to get something down while the memory of India is still fresh. It's such a different world that I'm afraid things will start to seem unreal very quickly as I adapt to life in the U.S. again. Heck, most of this weblog has probably seemed unreal to you.

When we returned from our trek in the Himalayas I decided to enroll in a 10-day Tibettan Buddhist philosophy and meditation course at Tushita Meditation Centre. The course is designed for westerners, taught by a western monk, and attended mostly by young travellers from all over the world. Each day I would rise at 5:30am, go for a vigorous walk to get the blood pumping, stretch, take a shower, meditate for 45 minutes, eat breakfast, go to philosophy lesson, do yoga, eat lunch, go to discussion section, go to another philosophy lesson, meditate again, eat dinner, and meditate once more before bed. The meditations were either "mindfulness meditations" where we concentrated on our breathing or "analytical meditations" where an Icelandic Buddhist woman would describe some topic which we were to use our meditative focus to penetrate more deeply. The topics ranged from appreciation of the preciousness of our lives to acceptance of our inevitable deaths, from controlling anger and hatred to developing love and compassion. The lessons followed the "Lam Rim," an old Tibettan distillation of the 84,000 teachings of Sakyamuni Buddha, including topics on karma and rebirth. The discussion sections were our 1-hour-per-day opportunity to talk with our classmates - the rest of the course was conducted in silence - the idea being that if you were eating, you should be only eating; if you were walking, you should be only walking; and so on. Of course, we did a lot of thinking too, which sometimes was good and sometimes not. So it goes. In the end, I took away a few good techniques for calming the mind and for developing love and compassion, two qualities that I think I could do with a little more of in the future. Buddhists define love as "wanting someone to be happy" and compassion as "wanting someone to be free of suffering." Such definitions are unconditional, meaning they come directly from the subject and are not effected by outside conditions such as the nature of the object. Thus you can love both your friends and enemies equally. The main way to develop love and compassion is to do an analytical meditation whereby you use thoughts and memories to willfully produce an intense feeling of love or compassion (such as imagining a good friend who you want to be happy, or a poor beggar who you want not to suffer), and then concentrate on that feeling as long as possible. The idea is that through your concentration you will actually reprogram your neural network so that the path to feeling love and compassion is simpler, and thus you will feel more easily in the future. I have no doubt that your mind is capable of this: there is much scientific evidence to support it. And one of the premises of Buddhism and indeed of most forms of mysticism is that your mind has a great and vastly unknown power to affect both your body and the world around you. I like to think of it in terms of E=mc2: all matter is energy, so it's really just mind energy affecting matter energy. Oh man, you say, he's really gone bonkers now. Go to India, I say. It's a very spiritual place.

Anyway, after 10-days of barely talking there were a lot of people to meet, so I spent the next two days eating and hiking with my classmates, getting to know their situations. They were amazing people - doing good work all over the world. Too soon I had to leave for Delhi, where I spent two days walking in the mornings and hiding from the heat in the afternoons. I walked about the old Mughal city of Shahjehanabad and the new British Delhi of Lutyens. In a park in Old Delhi I met some friendly Indians who invited me to their tiny house. Six of them lived, ate, and slept in a house with one room (about 10'x10') an antechamber and a toilet. They spent their time going to school, tailoring clothes, and making beadwork handicraft designs. One of them had just recently recovered from Typhoid. But despite all this, they were very happy people, and I couldn't help thinking after my Buddhist course that what really creates happiness in this world is not how much you have but how much you give. The law of karma says simply that if you love others, then they will love you, and you will be happy. Albeit it's necessary to have a little money for food and shelter, but beyond that you're better off spending more time developing a loving mind and less time developing a bulging bank account.

When I stepped off the plane from Delhi to Frankfurt and boarded the one from Frankfurt to San Francisco, I was overwhelmed by the number of westerners I saw. I thought about how lucky I was to have been born in a rich country, where my basic needs are provided for, where I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I thought about how much happiner people would be if they only realized how lucky they were - if they only knew that it's much more effective to cultivate happiness in your mind than to seek it from the outside world.

I went to India seeking the next step in my life. For the past three years I can honestly say that there hasn't been a single day when I've been discontent. At times I've been sick, tired, angry, afraid, overworked, and a bunch of other things, but beneath it all there's always been this deep-seated, unshakeable contentment. I think it comes from enjoyment of being in the mountains, being with friends, and being with myself. But at this point I feel like I've taken enough happiness for myself, and it's time to start giving it back to other people. I can't spend my whole life flying around the world chasing mountains and making friends. Not after I've seen people that can't afford to dress themselves, let alone travel. So now it's off to Alaska to make a little money and for one last mountain hoorah, and then it's time to start contributing. I'm not sure yet what I'll do: probably something with renewable energy; and whatever I do will be a drop in the bucket; but I saw enough leaky taps in India to realize that if everybody puts more drops in than they take out, the bucket will eventually fill up. I've come to realize that there are two paths available after college: to work primarily for your own benefit or to work primarily for the benefit of others. The Buddhists would say that the latter path is the path to true happiness. So I'll leave you with a quote from the Dalai Lama:

Every day, think as you wake up:
Today I am fortunate to have woken up.
I am alive, I have a precious human life.
I am not going to waste it.

I am going to use all my energies to develop myself
To expand my heart out to others
To achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

I am going to have kind thoughts towards others.
I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others.
I am going to benefit others as much as I can.

So there you go! Thank you all for reading! I hope I will see each of you soon!
Love,
Josh