April | Cycling, Writing & Reading

Hermann Hesse, Rohinton Mistry, Philip Kapleau, George Orwell, Slavomir Rawicz, Shunryu Suzuki, Alan Watts, Louis Fisher, Ram Dass

I crossed Tamil Nadu and Kerala, India's two most southerly states, and became accustomed to the traffic, the food and the heat. The food is excellent—the heat, torture. And the traffic is not so bad. Things get hairy only when other drivers take selfies with me (while driving). But who am I to refuse a selfie? I also spent time in two ashrams: Bodhi Zendo and Amma's Ashram. Both expanded my consciousness, and you'll note below that my reading this month followed a distinct spiritual vein... Anyway, please let me know (by reply) the books you've been reading, or say if you've also appreciated any on this list. Have a great month! — Hec

---

Cycling

April began in Kodaikanal, a hill station in the west of Tamil Nadu, some two thousand metres above the plains. Here, I stayed in Bodhi Zendo, a Zen Buddhist ashram (I will share more about it in the coming weeks). Thank you to Viola for the recommendation! It was peaceful and purifying, nestled between the wooded hills.

One week there became sixteen days, and it was difficult to leave. On leaving, I said goodbye to many new friends.

After, I went south to the southern tip of India, to the famous and holy Kanyakumari. I spend just a night and then rode west through Kerala, which was green and tropical and pleasant. I loved riding along the coast through famous and not-so-famous beachside towns or villages: Varkala, Kollam, Alappuha, Kochi, Kozhikode.

The most spectacular sections were along single track beach-front roads, between villages where bicycle tourists are rare. But I did meet one! German Frank, with no helmet and piercing blue eyes. He offered me a Camel Gold. “You’re happy to see me,” he said. I certainly was. Alas, we had hardly spent an hour together before I suffered a broken spoke and was forced inland. Thereafter, I ended up riding through silent backwaters, beside expansive flat paddy-fields that get their water from the Western Ghats, the mountain range that casts a rain-shadow across Tamil Nadu (you can see it on the satellite image). The range stops the monsoon which will arrive a month from now in southern Kerala; it’ll migrate north, as if chasing me.

---

Writing

Hermann Hesse’s Autobiographical Writings, a paperback I discovered in the Zendo library, inspired me to write more. He wrote simply about his life. In Hesse, we read his intellectual freedom and honesty; he is unconstrained by facts but never lies. He uses magic and appreciates the ordinary. 

“People of my sort are content with little and yet only with the highest. Amid pain and despair and a gagging disgust at life, always once again for a holy instant to hear a yes to the question of the meaning of this life, which is so hard to bear - though at the next instant we may be smothered once more by the dim flood, that suffices us, from that we can live for quite a while and not merely live, not just endure life, but love and praise it.”

He has fun when writing. Imagine! Fun while writing? How many people who write frequently have zero fun when hacking away at it? Yes, lots of us appreciate having written. Likewise, I appreciate having gone to the gym, having cycled, having had a difficult conversation. But to enjoy the act of writing? It’s rare. Still, I think the process can be a joy, too, though we must be honest, just as Hesse is.

This month I shared the following:

---

Reading

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. I was hoping to learn more about India, and didn’t expect to learn so much from a novel. It was great, and the high goodreads score is representative. Thanks Dad for the rec. A Fine Balance is a harsh story of how hard life was as a member of the Untouchables, the lowest caste in India. The story is brutal, and is summed up well by the following quote,

“After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. Such a great title, and it’s appropriate for the cycle/blog. Why did it take me many months before I read it? Hesse’s journey is essentially spiritual, not physical; it’s discovering the self, not crossing borders. We don’t need a passport to go East in the way Hesse intends. It’s a trip shared by all of us, and some get far in one lifetime while others hardly begin. It’s a paradox that we are already at Hesse’s destination, we just need to realise (to awaken). And while this is not his greatest novel, I found it interesting to understand his thoughts on spirituality. He writes,

“For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.”

The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau. This book gives a great overview of zen. There is no need to read it sequentially. I found the chapter on enlightenment experiences the most interesting, and the Q&A about meditation technique the very helpful.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. This is now one of my favourite novels. Orwell tells the gritty story of a young man, Gordon Comstock, who declared war on the “money god”, and then makes all of his life decisions not positively towards a hopeful future, but in the negative, abstaining — so far as it’s possible — from making money. He is free! But he is trapped by his rejecting of the corrupted system! Orwell’s irony is that Gordon Comstock is controlled more by money because he obsesses about its repudiation. Gordon takes the lowest paying job, for example, because it’s low paying, and then he suffers when he can’t afford anything. Gordon belittles everyone who submits to capitalism, but no one thinks of capitalism quite so much as he. I laughed a lot.

“What he [Gordon] realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion—the only felt religion—that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”

And below is an aspidistra. …do you own one?

The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. So gripping that I stayed awake reading all night. It tells the true story of Rawicz’s escape from a Siberian forced labour camp, deep in the USSR, during World War II. It’s a short and excellent read. It made me want to live more adventurously. Thank you to Robin for the recommendation.

Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. A classic. Canonical for anyone interested in anything Zen.

“Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.” …
“So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention. So you may say, “Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well.”

The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts. Watts is a brilliant spiritual communicator, on the level of Ram Dass (below). He points to many of the insights pointed to by Suzuki. I enjoyed it, not least for the following insight about how life happens all at once:

Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet agin, the cat turns around and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head’s effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together; they are all one cat.

The cat wasn’t born as a head, which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer’s trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn’t see the whole cat at once.

Watts says we are all one life, one happening, not youth and subsequently old age. It just *feels* like we are old after we are young. Far out!

And Watts also rambles quite a bit… in one ramble he says the following (which I appreciated):

“Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.”

Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World by Louis Fisher. To be in India and not learn about Gandhi’s life would be a sin. His story is amazing, and we could all aspire to live according to his “simple, widely flouted principles”. Fisher writes,

“Gandhi’s on-the-earth simplicity, devoid of any appearances or reality of power, emphasised his authority. The omnipotent dictator is the least likely to have any authority. Gandhi has no power to compel, punish, or reward. His power nil, his authority enormous. It came of love. Living with him one could see why he was loved: he loved. …

Nor could one fail to notice, in each sentence and attitude, his lifelong loyalty to a few simple, widely flouted principles: the exaltation of means over ends; nonviolence; the primacy of truth; the curing qualities of trust; and consideration for the other person’s doubts, time-lag, environment, and inner conflicts.”

The Only Dance There Is by Ram Dass. One of the most far out books I’ve ever read. Ram Dass explains karma, free will, the mystical, and his experiences in India after finding his Guru. It’s a compilation of two talks he gave to psychiatrists in 1972. I wonder what they were thinking at the time?! Ram Dass explains, "If it's the only dance there is you can dance it from Ugh or you can dance it from Ah!" — a sentiment I appreciate.