Spiritual Adventure in India, Nepal, and Bhutan

Spiritual Adventure Update

Nothing opens your mind like a total change of reality. This trip has made some big patterns within me shift perspectives, modify, and evolve. This adventure to was nothing like I expected. It has been a continuing process to live in the moment, to learn to enjoy the present, and to let go of pictures, expectations, and desires.

One of the guides on the Bhutan trip lives on and off in India. He had a phrase that I love and echoes in my mind, “People come to India and think that they will change India. What they discover is that India changes you.”

I find that to be true for me.

Here is the fifth largest financial country in the world and I have never see such poverty and desperateness. There is garbage everywhere. People sleeping where ever they can. There is so much poverty you have the realization that you cannot possibly help in the conventional ways.

If you are unprepared for dealing with the beggars when you go out onto the street with small bills or coins in your pockets, it becomes very dangerous to suddenly dig in your purse as then everyone will come running up and wanting something from you. There is this awareness that you can do nothing really to make a difference except to treat everyone with compassion, friendliness, and understanding. I look in their faces and I wonder how many lifetimes I have been in their situation? How many lifetimes have I struggled just to eat?

I have no choice but to fall into deep gratitude and appreciation for being an American.

The standard of our life is total luxury for billions of people on this planet. No wonder everyone wants to come to America.

I would be riding in a motorized rickshaw and we would be stopped at one of the few traffic lights. Men on motorcycles see that I am a foreigner; probably a European or American and they want to talk to me. They all have tried to get a visa to work in America and are still trying to get one. Their hope is that I might have an idea or suggestion.

The Indian people are smart, well educated, quick, and will not turn down an opportunity to try to find a doorway to prosperity. But in business you need to be careful, as they will tell you anything you want to hear to get you to sign on the dotted line.

India is a huge mixture of languages and culture. We think it is just Hindi but in reality there are over 20 languages here. The television reflects that diversity. We think we are a melting pot but India beats us hands down.

Here is a country that has had China breathing down its neck for a long time; Pakistan wanting to blow it away and its own political corruption that would make us cringe in the US. It is a vitally, breathing, conflicted mass of total chaos. Yet, somehow it works.

Yes, it works.

As shocking as that sounds, it does seem to have a flow that manifests and is beautiful to observe. Painful but beautiful.

I have seen women working in 110 degrees, mixing cement in the most beautiful colorful saris. I have seen elephants and camels battling the cars and traffic at insane intersections that fray my nerves. I cannot image what that is like for an animal. There is constant honking for everything. It is actually a conversation. Honk, I am coming up on your right. Honk, I am coming up on your left. Honk, you are not moving fast enough, etc.

This is a land of contradiction. Garbage collection happens on Sunday morning and it consists of everyone sweeping it all out into the street in one spot and someone shoveling it into trucks to be taken away.

India invades your senses with smells and sights. You smell the spices, incense, garbage, human excrement, and dust. The dust covers everything. India is a huge landmass that is being pushed up into Asia. Most of India is flat plains that were once covered in jungle. But the jungle is gone and so there is nothing to stop the dry ground from being picked up by the wind creating dust storms that cover massive areas. From a plane your look out and see what you think is pollution. But it is dust.

The heat is oppressive. The air is so hot it is thin, so even though you are not at high altitude it is hard to get enough air, as it is so hot. Then when you breathe you are overwhelmed with the smells and dust that is ever present.

Unknowingly I picked the hottest month to be here. In America, May is the spring and it is nice and cool. In India, May is right before the monsoons and it just does not cool down. It is boiling. Even evenings are oppressive. There is no escape from the heat, except the restaurants and my apartment. There are rolling blackouts where there is no electricity, cable, etc. I spent one whole night in the dark waiting for the lights to come back on, sweating in my bed. It reminded me of the New York City, blackout in 1977.

Little things you miss, like toilet paper. Yes, isn’t that an interesting one. It’s the simple pleasures that make the difference.

Here you eat with your right hand and you wipe with the other hand. Some places have a water faucet to clean your hand at the toilet. Others do not.

Water is an interesting color and you cannot drink the tap water. There is a special filtration system attached to the kitchen sink for purifying the tap to make it drinkable. It uses ultraviolet light and all the bells and whistles. The water is stored on the roofs as there is not constant water. As it sits in these black water containers it gets really hot. So the tap water is hot. And inside you have to turn on the water heaters for your shower and to do the dishes. It takes 20 minutes to heat the water up to do the basics.

The theme here is that everything is more difficult, takes more time, and requires patience. As I was going to the airport to go to Nepal and Bhutan, the driver needed gas. He stopped at the station to fill up and even though his gas tank had a sign on it to put in only petrol (unleaded) in, the attendant filled the engine with diesel. If you know anything about engines, you cannot start the engine with the wrong fuel in it because you will ruin the engine. So suddenly we have multiple people trying to figure out what to do and I have a plane to catch with the time ticking away. We ended up getting the gas stations owner to give us his car to get to the airport. It was a great idea until I realized that there were more flies in the vehicle than outside the vehicle.

Washing you hands is not just a luxury. It is a necessity. I go anywhere and I do not touch my face or nose. I wash the moment I get in the door. I have been impressed with restaurants as they battle with attempting to manage ex-pat (foreigner) standards with no controls on food preparation in this country that I have been able to detect. My carefulness has kept me healthy until the last 2 days in Bhutan. Then I got food poisoning really bad. Thank God for the antibiotics, probiotics, colon pills, and black walnut.

I will still have to see when I get home if I caught anything else. But I was really careful and got all my shots for Asia from the travel clinic. I am sure I have avoided the worst. In truth, Peru was very similar to India in regards to the state of cleanliness and health concerns about food.

What I admire about this country is that they are strong vegetarians. If they were not it would be really difficult to feed them all. But the vegetarianism and how it is held with the Indians and how the Nepalese and Bhutanese hold it is very different.

In India if they are vegetarian, they seem to be very strict vegetarians. It is deeply held within their psyche. It is spiritual and not a flexible issue. Though the younger generation does not seem as willing to play by their parent’s rules and standards. This is because many families save for their children to go to the US or England to finish school and give them better opportunities. Once they are exposed to the way we live they do not really want to come back to this way of living.

Nepal and Bhutan are their own series of complex contradictions. I have a friend that did not believe me when I told her that I had a friend that was a chef and he had cooked for an event for the Dali Lama. He told me that the Dali Lama ate meat and drank alcohol. She practically screamed at me that that could not possibly be true as she was a devoted, heath conscious, vegetarian and had a picture of Buddhism and what the Dali Lama represented.

Even our Bhutan trip, there was a woman that personally ate with the Dali Lama and said he had a steak and drank a beer at dinner.

But being in Bhutan, I decided to find out if that was possible. I was able to get my many questions answered by the guides and our monk that was on the journey with us. They said that Buddhists do not believe in killing anything. It is not okay to kill an ant, fly, mosquito, worm, cow, chicken, etc. Killing and eating plants are okay.

They believe that to be human is a very special thing. They believe that there are billions of beings that want to earn the right to be human. They exist in the creepy, crawly world waiting for the chance to have a human body. People who die can go back to being animals or rocks (if you were really bad and killed another). Sometimes it is a choice. Sometimes it is because you were not generous and appreciative of your life.

It is something to remember so you can have another body in another lifetime. This is their belief, I am not sure if I believe it all but it is interesting to think about and to learn gratitude for this life, even if this life has not manifested what you wanted.

Anyway, since you cannot kill anything (if you are a Buddhist) that does not mean that you cannot eat dead animals. You just cannot be the one who killed them. So all the meat in Nepal and Bhutan comes from India (which is interesting because most of them are vegetarians) and is then shipped to those countries (which to me is the expensive way to do things).

Now, I have eaten the meat in all these places and I must say it tastes like a dead cow that died along the side of the road and someone dragged it to the meat processing plant. The meat was tough, grainy, and tasteless. So again, as American’s we are so spoiled by the amazing job the ranchers do, as well as, the inspectors for the meat.

The Bhutanese explained that in the high altitude cold climate you have to have fat and meat to survive. It is essential. There is very little land that is good for agriculture. You just cannot kill the animal yourself. But the government in Bhutan closes the meat stores in Jan for a month in order to observe the vegetarian policy and to not kill living things. But what people do is buy it ahead of time and then dry the meat or store it so they can still eat the meat during the fasting time of January.

The Bhutanese also believe that rules are just rules and that each situation is about flexibility. So you can be a Buddhist monk or nun and still get married and have children if you want. You could be married with children and then decide to become a monk or nun and live a celibate life also. Ten percent of the population is polyamorous. Meaning that a woman can have more than one husband and a man can have more than one wife. This is social acceptable as land is passed down through the women’s line and there are times when the property requires the help of more than one man and many children.

In Bhutan, penises are a symbol of protection and prosperity, so they paint them on their walls of the houses on the outside. It is an interesting experience to see.

Bhutan is a country, which has been protected because of its remoteness and the impassable mountains. Roads are few and far between. All roads (except one stretch past the water sanitation plant in the capital) are one lane. Now the road is a two-lane road but there is really only one lane. Passing an oncoming car, or worse, truck is not for the faint hearted. That is because Bhutan is like the Alps. Sharp, steep, cliffs made out of sandstone that has been pushed up from the bottom of the ocean by tectonic forces of India slamming into the Asian landmass. So it rains and the roads on cliffs wash completely away or become slick and muddy. The wind blows and rocks and roofs fly off and block roads. They must constantly work to maintain the roads. There is only one road that goes from east to west in Bhutan and it is a twisty windy road that you are required to go very slowly.

Then there is the perspective of Gross National Happiness, which is the country motto from their latest king. It is a great idea and seems to work well regardless of the desperate poverty. I found the people happy and content, following strong Buddhist principals and having a way to find contentment in every moment. It is very endearing. But then you hear and realize that all the hard jobs (road building, tar manufacturing, gravel laying, dam building is all being done by Indians who are bought in for these jobs specifically and when their job is done they are required to leave the country immediately. They live in shanties along the roads they are working on. They are considered second-class citizens but they are thrilled to have a job when in their country there are a billion people who are desperately struggling to get out of the poverty. So amazingly they are quite happy also.

Again, one of those contradictions. It is easy to promote Gross National Happiness if others do the miserable jobs. Hum. Interesting.

I have seen temples and intricate paintings from the 6^th century into the present. I have seen that the buildings even today in Bhutan are being built the same way for the past 2000 years. In the city of Paro and Timphu they are using more cement and modern techniques but they are still making houses out of mud walls with flayed bamboo rebar.

I have prayed and listened to the beautiful Buddhist chants and drums and the sound of timeless devotion has shifted the neural pathways in my body. I have felt more joy in being me and a wonderful appreciation of my body, my health, my mind, my parents, my opportunities, my country, and being vitally alive and consciously awake to be present with this experience.

So any of you that want to see Bhutan before it becomes more modern, I recommend you make that happen sooner rather than later. They are building an airport in the middle of the country in the central valley and that will change it forever. But know if you go, there is a lot of driving just to get anywhere. There are days when all you do is be in your SUV cage to get to the next place.

Patience is the key. Carry snacks. Be prepared for none of your normal American luxuries to be there. There is no Diet Coke. There are no chocolate bars. There is no ice cream.

But there are people with a heart that will melt you into your authentic appreciative self. They will show you compassion you have never shown yourself. Bhutan will break you down. It will show you your expectations. It will show you what you are addicted to. It will not allow you to fall into your habits. It will force you to breathe and be grateful for each gasp of air that fills your emptiness. You will see views that few eyes have witnesses. You will find the simplicity that you have lost. You will get a peak into the past and into the ways your ancestors have struggled to survive. You will become grateful for all those that have helped you become this amazing person you are. The Bhutanese will show you where your strength has been hidden away. You will find your faith in life itself. You will find that your mind is just an illusion. You will become committed to becoming your best self. You will come home revitalized, healthy, cleared of old priorities, ready to enjoy the life that has always been waiting there for you.