Plans, God, and Time

I have a few hours to kill now before my tabla lesson, so I thought I'd write more on the blog.
A check up on my trip, my plans for the rest of my time:
So we're leaving Banares this saturday to head to Daramshala in Himachel Pradesh. I think the timing is just perfect--if I had much more time here, it wouldn't be productive at all, but I don't feel like we are leaving too early either. I am excited for the natural beauty of Himachel Pradesh; I have only ever seen one mountain range in my life, and this one will be good too. I am going to be less busy with acedemics, and I might not get a new tabla teacher there, in favor of just practicing and making music on my own. I will be doing a homestay with a tibetan buddhist family, and I am really interested in that part of it; it'll be great to get to know those people. I hope they speak english, because I don't know tibetan and my hindi is "tuti-fruti" (broken). So I sort of see my two and a half weeks in Daramsala as my own private meditation retreit involving walking in the mountains and playing music and hopefully writing. Of course, I don't know how it will actually be, that's just what I want. It will be whatever it is.
After that homestay, the group will go on a ten day long meditation retreat. I have told my program leaders that I don't want to do it, so hopefully they will let me off on my own for that period of time. My preliminary desire (having still done no research) is to go to Gangotri, which is the head of the ganga river and one of the most beautiful and sacred spots in India.
After that, the group will go on a trek in the himalayas. I hope to rejoin the group, and check back in to the program. If they say that I need to just leave the program in order to be free of the mediation retreit, I will do so. But the trek is what they call a 'cultural trek' where we hike from mountain village to mountain village meeting people. I think I like that idea, but the colorado boy in me says "let's go climb mountains!"
After that, the group goes back to Delhi, and then home. I think I will go with them to delhi, and try to stash my drums in a locker or something in Delhi, but spend as little time there as possible. Then, I want to go to Jaipur in Rajastan for a few days, see some temples, pick up some miniature paintings, then go to Mumbai for as little time as possible, then go to Goa for a day or two, maybe more if I like it, to rest, chill on the beach, and make fun of American people to myself. Then I want to go to Tamil Nadu where there are many huge famous temples and things that I want to see. Then I want to go to Kerela, spend a day or two in Cochin (which has a really interesting and ancient Jewish quarter), and spend a few days boating around the backwaters of Kerela. Then back through mumbai to agra (I guess I have to go to agra.) and then back to delhi and then back home.
So that's that. Timewise, I'm a bit less than halfway though my trip, but travelwise, I haven't even begun. As I begin to travel more, the blog entries will certainly drop off. sorry.

About Sarah's and my dialogue; I think that what I am trying to say is that we should call whatever is there, whatever is in front of our noses, devine. Both in the everyday sense--life is divine--and in the structure-of-matter way. It's not a matter of a 'hidden variable' it is just that whatever is there is there and that simple fact is absolutely amazing and awe inspiring. That fact alone allows us to be athiests because we don't have to beleive in anything that is not whatever it is, while understanding that there may well be things we cannot comprehend or understand. It would be arrogant of us to think that we can know everything. But what we can know is so beautiful and complex, it can be seen as a conciousness, and our own human conciousness is only a part of it. It's just wordgames that I am playing, choosing to define things as divine which my sister would define in much more precise terms. It's all just linguistic constructions.

Oh, I wanted to post a blog entry about the Indian idea of time. So if you've read all I've written so far, good work, and there's more. Indians beleive in a cyclical vision of time. Westerners tend to beleive in linear time, which is usually tied with an idea of progress, moving forward and building better things out of the past. For example, the idea of evolution has become fundamental to many liberal-minded westerners. Indians beleive the opposite--that the best, most pure time was the first age of humanity, a sort of golden age of wisdom and innosence. If you look at Indian ancient history, you may be convinced that they are right. The vedas, the oldest books of humanity, the first written words, are increadibly sophisticated and wise; the first written words of humanity weren't about how to farm or make fire, but about the nature and power of conciousness. The books I have been reading, which come much later but still way, way predate Homer, astound me in their sophistication, even their similarity to many very recent poststructuralist thinking. So the first humans may have been the smartest, most righteous. According to the Indian worldview , the four evils were not introduced until later on, when the population began to test the bounds of the available resources and people slowly became greedy and selfish. In every age since, we have been getting progressively worse. The current age, Kali Yug, is the last age, the shortest age, and the most immoral age. They beleive that we are in the process of driving ourselves to distruction so that creation can begin anew. Kali Yug began at the death of Krishna, which I roughly roughly estimate to be a really long time ago. Someone look it up and let me know.

This shift in worldview is really a fundamental difference. First of all, it makes Indians sort of dissociate from their lives a little bit--makes them think that the world actually is going down the shitter and there's nothing you can do about it, so they sort of hold themselves aloof. It affects their political views--as India has just gotten permission from the United States to have a nuclear arsenal, people just take it nonchalantly as another step towards the inevitable. It also makes them really proud of their ancestors, and the old stories are held in such high regard because they are proof that these people are descended from the first people, the greatist sages.

The word for yesterday is the same as the word for tomorrow. Kal. And when Indians use the word in a sentance, they actually don't bother to specify which one they are talking about. This is annoying, but interesting. They completely disregard the idea of a schedule, and are usually late. My teachers expect me to be on time, but then hold me much later than the time I was supposed to leave, thus making me late for my next lesson, saying something like "time is an illusion" or "indians don't care, your teacher won't mind."

Anyways, that's what I have to say today. Please leave a comment or shoot me an email or something if you want to.
peace