Nepal is Love: Trekking Recapitulates the Spiritual Journey
I realize when one thinks about Nepal one may think of it as a third world nation, with political factions, poverty, and problems with resources and growth. Faced with the interminable unknown and in the face of the “other”, we shrink in fear or roll our eyes in cynical detachment, masquerading our provincialism and dogmatism as sophisticated intellectualism. We forget that Nepal has many of the problems facing first world nations, simply less insulated in its delusions that everything is “okay”. Yet it is precisely, and paradoxically this profound sense of “okay-ness” that Nepal communicates.
I dream of Nepal as space and touch, as in some metaphors of consciousness. Consciousness as space is openness of welcoming of the manifestation of phenomena. The welcoming space of consciousness is love and forgiveness. Consciousness as touch is the primary expression of being positing its own existence. Consciousness’ first movement is self-positing: I am. It is the only miracle; all other miracles are transformations of the primary miracle. Consciousness is the self-expression of being. This feeling is best understood as touch which an unmediated sensation of proximity.
“Nepal is Love” is an invocation towards feeling-consciousness that facilitates the high spiritual odyssey of my future trek and visit to monasteries. “Nepal is Love” facilitates this intensification of consciousness, pressing consciousness beyond the circumstance of mind to its primary ground. As an invocation, “Nepal is Love” is a prayer, but not a prayer to the great other, but an open gesture to the great unknown that is both completely beyond the present conception of things and completely inseparable from all that is arising.
I should be clear: by high spiritual odyssey I don’t mean “high” in the sense of morally or structurally superior, I literally mean high as in altitude. Perceptually, one’s perspective is brought to bare against an expanse of immense proportions that brings us into direct conflict with many of our basic assumptions. It is this high perspective that Gene Gebser in The Ever Present Origin, cites as the beginning intuition of emergent rational mind. Gebser perhaps takes this as a unique event and response, as the different point of view a mountain gives credence to the intuition of “different perspectives”. (Summiting probably gave an impetus for the emergence of an evolutionary structure that had already developed) However, for the contemplative individual, differing perspectives is not the only gift of a “high perspective”. Being up high affords one the recognition of how limited one’s self-perception is, and that the weight of self-perception (its center-of-the-universe importance) is illusionary.
Of course, one could argue that we are merely swapping self-perceptions: one that is low and provincial for one that is high and expansive This argument would possibly hold sway if the gifts of “highness” ended at expanded awareness. For one thing, particularly in the Throne Room of Sagarmatha, our perspective comes face to face with our own sense of mortality and finiteness. Paradoxically, it is in our provincial dreams where we forget the vulnerable sweetness of the passing moment and the deterioration and suffering of all around us. We are trapped in a childhood stasis, a TV trance of endless cartoons. We live unconsciously, as if the body we abuse and the loves we wound are our interminable entitlement.
In the mountains, the vastness we encounter is not only the vastness of perception that takes in whole geological formations at once; we also encounter the vastness of life and its ubiquitous intensity. The polarity of our lives shift from containing nature as pets, gardens, plants, parks, to nature engulfing and contains us in a vast and unspeakable process. We encounter the immensity of the Large, the timelessness of ancient time, and violent but silent transformation. The existential reality of death, and therefore, of our imminent dispensability cleans the palate from our chronic constipation of mental systems and beliefs. We are afforded, at least in analogue, a direct perception of what is arising. We are not attenuated towards fasting in the west, whether it is fasting from food, people, places, or concepts. We eat these cultural memes hysterically and chronically as if searching for the edible deity of ultimate and endless pleasure. Our current obesity epidemic testifies to our chronic constipation of which Nietzsche poignantly asks us: “What does your body say about your spirit?”
Retreat, silence, leaving behind the comforts of habitual adaptations brings us directly against our fears. It is there we confront the “unlived lines of the body” and move beyond the self-satisfied veneer of pop-consciousness. A long trek does not necessarily immerse us into complete silence, but it does afford long stretches of confrontation with silence and self. We are pushed to our limits physically, we are placed in unusual and perhaps uncomfortable cultural contexts, and as we stated earlier, we are awakened into the realm of the Large.
Trekking recapitulates the spiritual journey, pulling life into a singularity where then the ground that transcends life, and in which life arises, can shines forth in immaculate clarity.
I dream of Nepal as space and touch, as in some metaphors of consciousness. Consciousness as space is openness of welcoming of the manifestation of phenomena. The welcoming space of consciousness is love and forgiveness. Consciousness as touch is the primary expression of being positing its own existence. Consciousness’ first movement is self-positing: I am. It is the only miracle; all other miracles are transformations of the primary miracle. Consciousness is the self-expression of being. This feeling is best understood as touch which an unmediated sensation of proximity.
“Nepal is Love” is an invocation towards feeling-consciousness that facilitates the high spiritual odyssey of my future trek and visit to monasteries. “Nepal is Love” facilitates this intensification of consciousness, pressing consciousness beyond the circumstance of mind to its primary ground. As an invocation, “Nepal is Love” is a prayer, but not a prayer to the great other, but an open gesture to the great unknown that is both completely beyond the present conception of things and completely inseparable from all that is arising.
I should be clear: by high spiritual odyssey I don’t mean “high” in the sense of morally or structurally superior, I literally mean high as in altitude. Perceptually, one’s perspective is brought to bare against an expanse of immense proportions that brings us into direct conflict with many of our basic assumptions. It is this high perspective that Gene Gebser in The Ever Present Origin, cites as the beginning intuition of emergent rational mind. Gebser perhaps takes this as a unique event and response, as the different point of view a mountain gives credence to the intuition of “different perspectives”. (Summiting probably gave an impetus for the emergence of an evolutionary structure that had already developed) However, for the contemplative individual, differing perspectives is not the only gift of a “high perspective”. Being up high affords one the recognition of how limited one’s self-perception is, and that the weight of self-perception (its center-of-the-universe importance) is illusionary.
Of course, one could argue that we are merely swapping self-perceptions: one that is low and provincial for one that is high and expansive This argument would possibly hold sway if the gifts of “highness” ended at expanded awareness. For one thing, particularly in the Throne Room of Sagarmatha, our perspective comes face to face with our own sense of mortality and finiteness. Paradoxically, it is in our provincial dreams where we forget the vulnerable sweetness of the passing moment and the deterioration and suffering of all around us. We are trapped in a childhood stasis, a TV trance of endless cartoons. We live unconsciously, as if the body we abuse and the loves we wound are our interminable entitlement.
In the mountains, the vastness we encounter is not only the vastness of perception that takes in whole geological formations at once; we also encounter the vastness of life and its ubiquitous intensity. The polarity of our lives shift from containing nature as pets, gardens, plants, parks, to nature engulfing and contains us in a vast and unspeakable process. We encounter the immensity of the Large, the timelessness of ancient time, and violent but silent transformation. The existential reality of death, and therefore, of our imminent dispensability cleans the palate from our chronic constipation of mental systems and beliefs. We are afforded, at least in analogue, a direct perception of what is arising. We are not attenuated towards fasting in the west, whether it is fasting from food, people, places, or concepts. We eat these cultural memes hysterically and chronically as if searching for the edible deity of ultimate and endless pleasure. Our current obesity epidemic testifies to our chronic constipation of which Nietzsche poignantly asks us: “What does your body say about your spirit?”
Retreat, silence, leaving behind the comforts of habitual adaptations brings us directly against our fears. It is there we confront the “unlived lines of the body” and move beyond the self-satisfied veneer of pop-consciousness. A long trek does not necessarily immerse us into complete silence, but it does afford long stretches of confrontation with silence and self. We are pushed to our limits physically, we are placed in unusual and perhaps uncomfortable cultural contexts, and as we stated earlier, we are awakened into the realm of the Large.
Trekking recapitulates the spiritual journey, pulling life into a singularity where then the ground that transcends life, and in which life arises, can shines forth in immaculate clarity.
posted by gac at
September 20, 2007
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