"India Isn't About Me"
India's Initial Lessons, v. 1.0
March 24, 2023
We are leaving soon. As full as this trip has been, it's almost more overwhelming to feel the end approaching. There's much more for me to feel and understand about this experience and I'm leaving incomplete, I can feel the holes inside.
Erin says each trip to India is actually three trips - the trip you plan, the trip you actually have, and how the trip unfolds in you after you get home. This last one can take a long time. I'm trusting that more will be revealed to me in the coming weeks and months. What has all this meant for me? How has it and will it change me? Not things I can know or say now. Maybe later.
I do have some early thoughts though, an initial "batch" of lessons...
We don't know what's going on - At least a dozen times a day I've been in or observing situations that I don't understand. "What are those people over there doing, and why?" "How come I need to go to a different ticket window and take this little piece of paper you've just given me and use it to get another little piece of paper that I'll then give to someone else later?” These questions and so many others.
I'm used to being in a culture where I either know what's happening, or I can reasonably guess, or I can ask someone. But even when I think I know what's going on, do I really? Here it's clear. India is pitching and... Three Strikes! I'm Out. The only thing I can reasonably do is give up. Surrender into the not knowing, let go into the flow of things.
When I asked Erin at some point when and how she meditated in India, she just laughed. "I'm always meditating here." Now I get it. It feels too noisy and active for formal meditation, but one is continuously encouraged and even required to simply be present, aware and open. Letting go of the mind's drive to "understand" and thereby feel safe or strong. It's all Maya - the boundless play of Life - and it's got me, coming and going.
India isn't about me. At All. - This is a big one and a subtle one too. As a white man, educated and with some success, American culture is fully oriented around me and my life. Here it becomes clear. All the things I might want to do, and the ways I want to do them, are naturally set up for me in the US. My movements through life are smooth and what I want comes easily. This is not true for others, and the work and deprivation of many is required for what comes to me. Like a fish doesn't perceive water, I can't see these truths so clearly at home (embarrassingly...) This warrants more of my attention.
Meanwhile, here in India, I'm not the center of the show. More like a sideshow oddity. Tall and pale, a disturbing mash-up of Crocodile Dundee and Eddie Bauer. Maybe good for a few rupees or some English practice or a laugh among friends as they look and comment. And why shouldn't it be this way for me here? It is this way for most people everywhere, to be blindly categorized, stripped of individuality, viewed and treated as an object. May I take the energy of my self-centered upsetness and use it to make effort to not objectify others...
Humanity is vast and varied - India is home to over 1.4 billion people, just this month surpassing China as the most populous country on Earth. Unlike China (and the US and many countries) a sense of a cohesive, singular national identity is quite new, perhaps starting to develop only in the last 100 years. Prior to the founding of the country in 1947 there were dozens of larger states and several hundred principalities. Even after 1947 part of the identity has often included "we include many different cultures" though this has arguably been diminishing (unfortunately so, in my eyes).
Nonetheless, the variety of life visible in India just stepping onto the street is immense. Rising wealth and distressing poverty, Western "progress" and home-spun tradition, secular and sacred, hustle and mañana, energetically living and actively dying. We don't need to travel around; it all comes right to you. In fact, it takes effort to avoid it. We try not to make such effort (though taking breaks is a necessity too).
How could one see this much variety in the States? In would involve a lot of travel, and crossing not just state boundaries, but the sharp lines our culture has drawn between races, religions, the well-off and the poor. We're all to stay in our lanes. In Indian culture, as with its roads, it's less clear to me where the lanes are, and it makes me wonder about the lines we've drawn at home, and the lines I've drawn in my own heart. How necessary are they? How accurate? Can I let them loosen? Can I let in the world more freely?
The richness of the full spectrum life here is earthy and heady and full of vitality. Something in it calls to a part of me I hadn't known was asleep. Perhaps each of our lives is also this big and rich. It does feel this way to me, and that when I open to India, She unlocks the larger Life within me.
So... There is much to digest. Although we've been here a few weeks, this trip will continue much longer inside me, perhaps never fully ending (always true of our most important travels). Thanks for letting me share these first impressions.
Excellent writing. Confusion in clarity.