Adrift

The photos are more or less non-sequitors. They don't correspond to the article. There's still one more batch to come.

It's my last night in India. The wedding was fun, beautiful, different. A truly unique experience that I feel blessed to have had. This is my 4th attempt at writing this story. It started nearly a month ago, in McLeod Ganj. I had gone to yet another terrible yoga class in India. I had been reading Jitterbug Perfume, and more than anything I suppose, I'd been traveling alone in a very foreign place for quite a while. A foreign place, that, at least in some of my circles, has many mythical notions associated with it. So I suppose, that, as I was hiking up the Himalayas (to get a better look at them), it's no surprise that I had the 'epiphany' that I had.

It started mostly as a feeling, an amplification of the disgust I'd felt at temples whilst being herded around and made to part with my money. That feeling was reverberating off of Jitterbug Perfume's Dionysian bent, all of which was bouncing through the reality of everything I saw around me. What it left in my head resembles very much what Indian cities look like - a dirty hodgepodge that a whirlwind just passed through.

I was supposed to go, very soon, to Rishikesh to go to an Ashram for one week. The week lined up well with my schedule, and it happened to be a weeklong program about the 'law of karma'. Every time I thought of the name of the program, a sick feeling welled up in my gut and all I could hear was the Brahmin man from Banares, as he was taking my 1100 rupees, telling me that the money wasn't for him, that it was good karma for me, for me. It would benefit me and my family, and we'd live long and happy lives. I heard the same thing over and over again, at temple after temple. I canceled.

So, it dawned on me that karma, as it were, and reincarnation, are just concepts that became religion because they were so useful for enforcing a social norm, one where people who were born into a role accepted their dharma, and worked to make the next life better. And then everything felt so cheap. All the yoga study, all the buddhism, the meditation. It wasn't that I really believed in reincarnation or any particular notion of Karma other than 'doing good things for others typically results in good things happening in your life, and vice-versa'. I never really believed in any cosmic enforcement of that principle - it just happens to work out that way, probably owing to evolution. But, I had allowed myself to believe in some greater order in the universe, and had allowed the possibility that the world was a more mystical place than I had made it out be. That there was some potential enlightenment waiting. And that maybe there was some universal force for love and goodness. And now, I feel like that is just the byproduct of wishful thinking.

I hadn't realized how foundational some of these notions had become to my present world view, and feeling them being yanked at from underneath was painful and confusing. I quickly concocted my own belief systems that had something to do with happiness being the primary goal of life, or, at least, the only goal that made any sense. But that seemed kind of forced and hollow.

This shouldn't be taken as pessimistic, it's really not. I don't feel bad, just a little baseless, adrift, as it were. I definitely have a lot of thinking and exploring to do in the coming weeks. With no enlightenment to strive for, no moksha, what? With no global underlying vibe of cosmic love, isn't the universe just so much cold space? Without that to believe in, then what?

I don't think we yet understand the power of belief, though it should be obvious as we watch people light themselves on fire in airplanes. It's powerful stuff, and you can harness it to great effect (sometimes very negative effect!) in your life. But first, you have to find something to believe in, something that makes sense.