Time Travel

The Ride

Chapter 2 - Time Travel 

Thankot " official entry point into Kathmandu. The security checking here used to be much heavier during the Maoist insurgency. Men wearing combats walking up and down the aisle, with their comrades clutching automatic rifles, on stand nearby. They were looking for men with dangerous ideas. I am not clear exactly what those ideas were but what was dangerous I thought was a bunch of men trying to squeeze reality into their limited and hopeful concept of what they thought it should be. The destruction and killing that followed was a consequence of that process and not the aim. The Maoists spent all their energy and drive to overcome their own resistance to reality that nothing worthwhile was achieved except for perhaps political power gain after the peace talks. But all political power gives you is an opportunity to effect reality, mostly through the physical means available. It does not give you control of reality but only the permission to control it so far as the political-economical setup allows it. This is analogous to a carriage driver giving you the reins of his horses. The question " ‘can you control the horses?’ " still remains. What we have in Nepal is seven incompetent men claiming that they are the ones to guide this political horse of reality. Most Nepalese have resigned to the understanding that there is no one in this carriage capable of driving this horse pulling us to our fate. So while the seven most immoral men quarrel in the front, the rest sit back hopeless. Many have bailed out of this carriage, planning never to get back on.

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal reveals what I think is a glorification of intellectual ideals and an underestimation of practice. Ideals are based on ideas, concept, of what should be, of what is thought to be correct. But no amount of idea can substitute practice. Practice is the present, ideals are always in the future. What one practices is ones true reality. Ideas and concepts can act as a guide to how one practices, but in themselves are not as important as we think. We do however place utmost importance on ideas and concepts, all preconceptions of reality, as this is the way we try to operate. We preconceive and then act, although it does not happen so in reality. The idea behind ‘using violence to achieve political ideals’ is that once these ideals are achieved then the whole party can switch over to good practice. That point of switching it seems still hasn’t arrived for the Maoists.      

The humid stillness of the plain waits calmly and silently. After Thankot it’s 6 to 7 hours of rolling down and around the hills before getting to the plains. Much of the highway runs alongside rivers and so the hilly section will consist of a cliff face on the right and a deep ravine on the left. The river is on average a few hundred feet below the road. A few occasional concrete bollards will stick out at the edge of the highway providing some hope and will remind me that our bus number could be read out on the news, on a template I’ve heard many times.  I look out over the long U-turn in the hills and can see bikes and buses ahead of us. The highway looks like a belt rolled out along the hills. The far away bikes and cars look like ant crawling down the back of a sleeping dog. The deep gorge below the U-turn is enough to give me a sense of our insignificance. This baseless depth below invokes a similar depth in my thoughts. I wonder if this is the same for other observers. The stillness of these hills causes a stillness of my mind and brings me intensely into this moment. There are only happenings in such a moment-simple straightforward happenings one after other. The mind has no place in this event. I feel as if someone has lifted me and placed me directly in the lap of the nature that surrounds me, my mind has vanished. It’s as if I have an invisible eye that sees all this, experiences this, but finds no need to understand it, to explain it, or find purpose behind it. I completely forget and stop thinking where I am headed to but still have full confidence that I am on the right path. An instinctive and unfathomable mind infinitely greater than my own is making all this happen and now there is nothing for me to do. 

Something distracts me, and invites the mind back from wherever it had gone to. The mind with all its thoughts comes rushing back in and covers up what had for a brief moment been revealed in that stillness. Now that closeness is gone, that immediateness is gone. My mind is alive and churning that great ocean of thought from my past and future, mixing it continuously. I think that it has taken most of my life to understand this freedom that comes from escaping the mind. Why now, why not many years ago. The path of my life has led me to this understanding of escaping the mind. However, it is not a path I drew or something I aimed at.

My mind returns to the anticipation of the plains. The pace of life is much slower there. A city person has a mind whose thoughts move at a much higher frequency. This often drowns out the immediate surroundings causing boredom. Just sitting, eating peanuts, basking in the quiet morning sun, makes no sense to a city person. But what is to be realized is that all this quiet activity is not supposed to make any sense at all. Existence is existence, what sense does one need to make to exist. Existence need not necessarily be understood intellectually. Reality exists equally for everyone just as water in a lake or rays from the sun. In the city however daily activities are more preconceived and aimed towards a goal. Do not waste time, do something rather than nothing, life is precious, time is money- all sorts of ideas on how one should spend time and value it as a precious commodity. Despite all such ideas however, even in the city people exist to exist just as in the villages. Preconceptions and aims are something extra in the mind albeit they may cause one to perceive reality differently.

The breast of these hills stand large and immovable on one side, and a steep cliff on the other side leads into an abyss of what I imagine to be a hard unforgiving granite base drenched in darkness. The embankment on the hill side can easily come crashing down above our ant like bus. The whole situation makes me feel helpless, not under the control of my destiny. We are at the mercy of this sleeping beast that will wake up any moment.  I never felt like this in UK while driving across large motorways. The feeling was always of being secure and in control.  Perhaps this feeling of control describes more accurately what it means to be developed, first-world. I cannot accept my circumstances just as easily now. I keep reminding myself of what I would rather it should be and that creates tension. In UK I remember riding through motorways imposed upon vast stretches of plains and low hills. The sense of control over nature was overwhelming. In Nepal this sense of control is far less. Turning on the radio and hearing of a man and his motorcycle bowled over the cliff by a boulder is what it means to be underdeveloped. I suppose this could also happen in a developed country but in Nepal we do nothing about it. Nature’s opportunity to bowl over vehicles goes unchallenged. I once tried to enquire whether this sense of control is something we too should aspire to and where does increased control ultimately lead to? After some enquiry into this enquiry I felt that this was going to be another of those complex tasks. So I dropped the entire exploration.

I think back to all those years and imagine myself as an eight year old looking through this same window and travelling down these hills. I then imagine never having got off this bus and somehow this bus kept going for all these years. What would have changed within me? Am I still not that eight year old? I may have collected a few more information through my senses during that 20 year long bus ride, but am I still not me. I have never felt this collection of memory to be myself. They just happen, but that which I call ‘I’ remains the same. How can that change? My thoughts about it may have changed, but the ‘I’ hasn’t. I feel I am pointing to something other than my thoughts and emotions, something other than my ego. But what is this that remains constant? What is this that breaks the illusion of time that supposedly transforms a person?

I can track what I think is the beginning of this thought further back to my childhood. I was playing outside my family home in Butwal. I must have been five years old. I ran into the house and stopped before the tall mirror on the cupboard. I saw this kid " sweating with patches of dirt marks on the face. As I was staring into this kid, a strange feeling overcame me " who the f**k is this guy? I’ve never seen him before. Am I supposed to represent this guy from now on? When was I given this contract?

I can still vividly recall the incident " the face, the sweat, the mirror " as clearly as I see myself now " and still feel the strangeness of that perception.

I talk of an eight year old 20 years ago as having an independent past existence, does it exist? Does this past exist? The more I look into it I find that the past can only exist in an intellectual form, in the mind. But in reality this present moment is all that exists. Has it ever been any different? In 20 years of bus ride it would always be present- the boy on the bus on the hill.

I was in sixth grade when I asked a friend " “what day is it?”

“Thursday” my friend replied.

And then almost without my thinking a question presented itself " what the hell is Thursday?

The scientifically correct answer came first- Thursday is a day after Wednesday, and as per some international convention it helps us keep track of time. I knew this was not the answer I was looking for. This answer did not come from the depth the question arose from. I then realized that up to that moment I had bought into this conventional perception of time " days, weeks, months, and years. I had used this clock time to perceive what exists ahead and behind of present time. I had a bad time last week, I will enjoy the coming week. I was this, I will be that. We say ‘I was born on this day as if that day repeats every year. It does seasonally by the earth’s revolution, but does a repetition of seasons mean a repetition of time? My first revision led me to see that time was a one-way continuum, a long unbroken string. I was born at one point of the string and am now at another point. But I soon realized that this too is a concept in the mind, albeit maybe a better concept. It was a year later when I enquired into the past and future that I found a more satisfying explanation of my confusion over what time is. The enquiry that caught my attention was " ‘what exactly is past and future? Do they exist?

If I was an omnipresent god I thought maybe it would. But does it exist for me?

What is my experience?

When I think of deep past I think of historical events " Genghis Khan with his Mongol army, Hitler conquering Europe, and Gandhi with his Dandi march. I know they existed, but those are events that I have no experience of. What is it that I have experience of? " My past. But my past is only in my mind, which is to say in my present " in this now. When has my life not been now? Never, it seems to me. It’s exactly the same with future. Next week is ‘Now + 7days’ except that the +7days does not exist. Only the ‘now’ exists. To me that is all there is to time " this continuous now.

I remember confiding in my friend " “Do you realize that Thursday, Friday, Saturday do not exist. My friend looked at me puzzled " “of course, I know they are mere convenience, and not real”

I looked at him, - He didn’t understand what I meant. He didn’t have the shift in perception of time. Its one thing to understand it as a concept intellectually that the days of the week do not exist, and another to perceive the reality of time directly " to see this reality of the continuous now as the container of our past and future.

I wake up, I must have slept for over half an hour. The bus has stopped and there is a queue ahead. Looking at passengers walking leisurely on the road tells me that this will be a long wait. I feel relaxed and calm and want to stretch so I walk out the bus. Mr Speed is on the cliff side and there is a few metres of space beyond where the tarmac ends. Passengers are using this vantage point to take pictures of the hills and valleys below. There is a thick fog in the small valley. It is rising gently as the morning sun warms the valley floor. Tiny looking houses with terraced farms cut within the hill slopes just above the small valley provide few signs of settlement. As a child I was always in disbelief how people could spend their lives in such places. I could not even understand how they got there to begin with.

The view makes me feel why did I ever leave this place.

Money?  That’s not the answer?

I wish I never had to leave Nepal. Like this fog that fills the valleys and pours out from the tip of the hills, I wish I could stay for a while and vanish without a trace. I feel that even a bird staring at this view form a branch acknowledges the beauty. This fog goes wherever the wind takes it and it is happier for that. So gently and surely the fog rises and will vanish spreading its gifts to the hills. This fog in a matter of few hours will create more beauty, more life, more love, than I ever will. And it does all this without any fuss, without care, without a thought, without plans, without a sound. The aliveness of this situation brings me here, to this present. If someone wanted to find me, they’d too have to be intensely present here. I feel strange. I find myself among these hills and this rising fog and all the buses on hold.

I know that this strangeness is the intensity of the present. I feel I’ve been here before and also know that I rarely come across this feeling. I discovered this back in UK. I was on a train travelling from Wales to England. Everything around me was infused with the bright golden rays from the late afternoon sun. Thoughts were dancing in my mind when I saw a little girl entering from the next carriage. She skipped to her parents smiling just like the trees and birds outside. And then suddenly " zoom, this familiar strangeness " this feeling of I’ve been here before but I know this is not a normal situation. The little girl and her parents were right across the aisle from me but I felt as if they did not see me at all, as if I was a ghost. I felt like I was in a movie and at the same time watching the movie myself. I could not explain to myself what happened that day. I thought it was an unusual incident but not so important to be enquired into, so I let it be. Similar incidents occurred a few more times after that when it was unusually sunny just before dusk, and on foggy days. I now think what happened to me on those days was that I got smacked in the face by the present. The intensity of the present brought my attention so completely to the now that both my past and future dissolved and no longer existed in that moment. I was for once free of the burden of time, burden of thought, free of my mind. I did not realize this burden existed until I was free of it, even if for the briefest of time. Whatever was around me, I was that. I could not be anywhere else than in that immediate moment, I could not be anything else than what was around me. How could I? I felt while I was in that moment. 

My mind was no longer a mediator between me and my reality. I was in direct contact, I was the reality, the continuous now. And in that union with reality a vast empty space opened up which was serene and peaceful. In my everyday life I am aware of myself. The separation from my surroundings can be strongly felt and I find that my thoughts are spread in the past and future, continuously revolving like a slot machine. But now this slot machine has almost stopped. There is still a slow revolution but this machine does not interest me anymore, I leave it to itself, its results are of no consequence to me, it will not decide who I am.

I now conclude that this present is the continuous now, or time if it could be called as such.

Time " I always understood it conceptually, as an idea, in my mind. But when I was confronted by it I found it strange, I still do. That’s what this strangeness is about, the intensity of the present, so intense that I cannot believe it to be real and somewhere feel that it must have some connection with my past life- even though I do not believe in past lives.

The birds chirping in the forest that covers the hills below is soft but intense. I feel as if the birds are sitting in a branch inside my head and singing a melody. I look around but cannot spot any of the birds. I feel that they’re only in my head. Seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, have all merged into one. I cannot tell if I’m hearing the birds or watching their song, whether I’m looking at the fresh sweet smell of the fog or smelling its softness. All this while stuck in a traffic jam as I would have labelled it. For me it’s a time jam, a dissolution of all past and future time that I always carry with me. My past is my memories " some are undoubtedly good memories but none the less a burden. It was good or bad in its time; it was what it was in some past now. Why do I need to store and visit it in this present now? Why do I derive myself from that stored memory? I do not know if this is a requirement for survival.

I am sure that the other passengers feel good too. I know that the feeling aspect that came to me first did not require any thought and explanation. It is there for everyone, no qualifications required, no intellectual level required. They may too dismiss it as something good but not worth thinking about, but none the less feel exactly as I am. In fact I am beginning to think that any analysis of such a situation can only interfere with this direct experience. Thinking does not seem, after all, to be as adequate a tool to understand the world.

Bijay is jogging back hurriedly from the carriages ahead. He announces as he approaches close;

“Let’s go. Road is open”

Passengers are heading back into their buses, cars, and trucks. This brief ‘dissolution of time’ session is over. I return to my seat and I think of reading my novel. The five Indians are the last to enter as the bus starts moving.

“Eh wait for us” says one to Bijay.

“Quick brother, it’s late already.”

We’re back on the road, wheels turn slowly and Mr Speed picks up pace to roll down around the hill. Insecurity creeps in again as I look above at the boulders. They look as if they are waiting for a specific bus number and so want us to move on. My thoughts have slowed for now, the slot machine is revolving at a much slower pace. My brief venture into the present has brought calmness and stillness. I wish I knew a sure way to get back there, to get those little birds back into my head and see them sing. I don’t think I can do it with conscious effort. It’s something that happens when you’re not desiring it to happen. It’s not something you do, it has nothing to do with doing. Being beyond any idea of purpose it seems I have to overcome a habit of lifetime to have more experience of this present time. The mind has no place in taking one to the present. The more you think about how you could access the present, the farther you get. The more you think about how far you are from the present, the still farther you get. But if all of a sudden the caring about to get to the present ceased, the present would reveal itself and your mind would then vanish. You would then be as if you were a child in your mother’s lap. You would go back to the days when you could not understand the difference between you and your mother.

I’ll have to settle for reading a novel. Long breaks in between reading have made it difficult to keep the momentum. I want to finish it and move on to the next one. Reading a novel at the right pace also requires a here and now mindset. A mindset that wants nothing from the pages of the book, a reader that reads because he enjoys reading. Intellectual growth is not the aim, nor to grasp concepts or devour facts. The reader does not have a book to complete as that implies a future goal. But also equally importantly whatever the opposite of these attitudes imply, the reader shouldn’t have those either. Then that gives the correct pace, correct rhythm, which can be fast at times, slow at times. It just does not feel right when this rhythm is disturbed. At times when I’ve read this book I’ve felt like the author was about to say something important but I just stomped on his mouth running over him and that I heard nothing but the sound of my own footsteps. Sometimes the author invites to run over the passages and string them together but I find myself trying to cautiously proceed from one word to another missing the entire picture. Although I am trying to point out to myself a few things that seem to be necessary for getting into the correct rhythm for reading I am beginning to realize that this too is entirely out of the control of one’s mind. Conscious effort can do very little to assist in this task, so I should just let it be. This way sometimes I can have a good read, sometimes not. I worry that my intellectual meddling might only reduce the chances of getting into this right frame for reading. On the rare occasions that it happens, I enjoy it and it motivates a lot of my reading habits. I now feel I’ve completely lost the aftereffects of the trip to the present and so pick up the book. I conclude that all my intellectual analysis so far of the correct rhythm will be useless on how this reading session turns out.

Another hour or so down the dog’s back and we approach our brief snacks break. It’s a small row of shops and food hotels in the middle of nowhere. Some of these places offer free meal to drivers to offload their passengers. I can smell hot food. Guruji pulls the hand-brakes and announces-

“Eat food everyone”

Most passengers get up from their seats while some have just woke up and look dazed.

I retrieve my wallet and wait for people to get off.