The Land of Contrasts

India is as big as the world...you can travel northward by train for 40 hours and still have a long ways to go to get to the border.

India is as tiny as your eyeball...as limited as your subjective experience.

India is the home of misery, dirt, and hunger...there are people living, sleeping, peeing on the streets, together with pigs, cows, and stray dogs. There are buildings that are falling apart wherever you look, there are streets that reek of urine and feces as everyone goes wherever the need strikes.

India is the home of wealth...there are luxurious castles that belong to Maharajas (rich men with many lovers), there are temples with gold statues, there are movie stars and technology savvy millionaires.

In India, there are thieves, criminals, and murderers. There are kids who blatantly reach in your pocket as they walk by, to check that your wallet is in place and take it off your hands. Sometimes they succeed.

In India, there are saints, altruists, and people who couldn't hurt a fly and wear special masks to assure that they *don't* hurt a fly. There is Mother Theresa. Some people in India consider Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the head of the organization Art of Living, a 'living saint'. He's devoted his life to serving people in need, much like Mother Theresa. The yogic breathwork birthed by him has healed thousands of people from physical and psychological ailments.

India is colorful, wild, and vibrant. There are women walking around in bright yellow, ruby red, sky blue saris, with red or yellow dots on the forehead. There are palm trees and colorful bushes, flowers in purple, orange, and pink. On our 40 hour train ride from Bangalore to Delhi, we met some beautiful Indian guys and gals and sang songs for hours and danced in the aisles as people selling water and chips tried to squeeze by us.

India is silent, calm, and colorless. Millions of spiritual seekers have passed through this land, searching the elusive experience of enlightenment. Sadhus dressed in white, or naked even, refuse to speak or utter a sound for years in order to attain the eternal peace, to divorce themselves from the chaos and wildness of a world full of suffering. During the first leg of our trip, when thousands of people from all over the world were gathered at the Art of LIving ashram in Bangalor to do yoga, many people chose to be in silence for a few days, to dive deep into their being. It allowed a horde of people to experience amazing serenity and calmness in the midst of a large, eclectic herd of humanoids.

In India, there is agonizing sadness and lakes filled with the bleeding of broken hearts, hearts ripped out by the goddess Kali, goddess of destruction. She likes to rip out people's hearts and eat them, leaving one stripped to the bones...sometimes she'll chew on those too as an after-dinner snack. People tend to think that Kali is 'evil' or a form of 'bad spirit'. Yet, every story in Hinduism has a metaphor (that's missed when we perceive the story literally) and every aspect of human mythology (including Kali) has a seed of wisdom. There are some who say that Kali symbolizes the stripping away of illusions...she destroys the evanescent attachments that we like to hold onto which will eventually destroy us. Perceiving her this way, she becomes a force for the liberation of the human spirit. I like this perception because I find that every time I feel the bitterness pangs of loss, when I feel my heart's been torn out of my chest and chewed on, when I feel stripped of everything that I've held dear or important, when I feel crushed to the bone by some event or person, when the only thing I can do is break down and cry, and I give in to that and break down and cry because I have no other choice, the tears that fall are cleansing tears...clearing the slate and preparing me for new life. Sometimes I actually need to break down, to let Kali take my heart, to fall apart completely so I can clear out the rubble, clear out everything that's no longer necessary and build something else. I met Kali's wrath in India and, for a moment, in the midst of breakdown, I felt more clear, more conscious, and more free than I've felt in a long while.

In India, there is blissful ecstasy and mountains built on the vast joy experienced by those who look past the shifting norms and forms of the world, onto that which lies beyond. At the Silver Jubilee of the Art of Living, there were more than a million people from all over the world, all gathered onto a huge dirt field that goes by the name of "airport". There were 4,000 musicians. When the musicians started playing music on the first night of the gathering, Zheliazko from our group, felt the spark and started dancing. I felt the spark and started dancing. A group of Indians walking by caught the spark and started dancing with us. The beautiful Indian lady flowed like water in her red sari. The guys with her were jumping around. More people from the Bulgarian group got up to join us. At one point, they started doing the horo...a form of Bulgarian 'line dance' that's done in a circle of people holding hands. Our Indian comrades joined in. It was wild. It was surreal. We became one with the music, the dance, the sky...at one point, I literally felt like I had no body. There was just the music and the dance and a kind of thumping was the only thing I could associate with self. It was a dreamlike state, a trance, a form of melting into an experience, and there was no LSD involved or any other forms of hallucinogenics...just music, dance, and the spark that we were all sharing and living at that moment. We were jumping around and singing and laughing and raising clouds of dirt under the stars and the moon in Bangalor. The trance-like state may actually have something to do with inhaling an extraordinary amount of dirt that was floating around the air, but I won't mention that part ;-) A few times, the thought, "Is this a dream?" floated by. It was met by the thought, "It doesn't matter, just live it." Maybe it was just a dream, but it was a shared, collective dream that I associate with the Hindu god, Shiva, the dancing god, who symbolizes the dancing universe of shifting norms and forms. He plays with all of it. He dances all of it. There is nothing that is excluded from his dance.

India is a land of contrasts. Every human heart has its version of India. It's not mandatory to go to India to experience India and yet, being in India, makes the experience of India all the more pronounced and alive and, at the same time, vague and subtle.

My experience at the ashram was one of celebration and stillness. Celebration within stillness. Stillness within celebration.

My city-mate Ergin was stunned at the love shown to him by strangers. People from Russia, Africa, India, Greece hugged him and welcomed him as one of their own. He had once said he was like a 'Comrade among strangers and a stranger among comrades. At home with that which is different and different from that which is at home.' (or something along those lines...a direct translation is hard to come by) This experience definitely allowed everyone in our group to feel at home amongst strangers...it seemed like the hard shields that protected people's hearts just melted in the heat of India and you could open up to people you had never seen before. Of course there was the choice of whether to let the shield drop or focus all your energy into rebuilding it again and again. I probably spent quite a bit of time doing the latter, but I won't mention that part ;-P.

Everyone greeted each other with Jai Guru Dev (translation: I salute the holiness in you.), except for the kids in the street who greeted us with 'Money, money, money' (translation: we want money). Contrasts, once again.

Within our Bulgaria group, half our time was spent singing and dancing and the other half was spent arguing about the series of problems that presented themselves to us as part of this journey, as lessons in dealing with conflict and coping with the unexpected. Some lessons, perhaps we failed, some we passed, and some we handled outstandingly. Perhaps it doesn't even matter. The important thing is that we survived and we can still learn from the experiences we shared.

One hard lesson came in Bangalor, as we waited for the train to go to our next stop in Delhi...we found out in the last minute that there were 20 spots on the train for the 50 people in our group. Well, we bunched together like sardines and managed to all get on the bus.After a mandatory period of finding a scapegoat, blaming them fullheartedly, crying, and arguing about what happened, many of us found a way to get past it in order to sleep and later sing and dance. That's my criteria for a lesson passed...if you can sing and dance when all is over, you've passed. If you can do it without reservation, you've handled it outstandingly, but at that point, it doesn't even matter, as everything except that moment is no longer relevant.

To be continued...