Coming From Nowhere, But Going to Somewhere

Tashi Delek friends, family, acquaintances, miscreants, and and all others who happen to come across whatever this is. Today is absolutely beautiful. Everyday is absolutely beautiful. You'll have to excuse me, for whatever reason, I'm in a rather slaphappy mood. As I was walking down Temple Road here in McLeod Ganj, some very wonderful and beautiful thoughts arose in my mind which I thought might be quite nice to share with whoever felt like listening...sadly, I have forgotten these thoughts. All compound phenomena arise and fall, such is the nature of existence. Maybe they will arise again. Slowly, perhaps too slowly, my (mis)conceptions about Dharamsala are being washed away. A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away?) I came to India largely because I wished to visit Dharamsala, because I thought this place would be paradise. Three years ago in late October, I managed to spend about three days here. Those three days were among the most terrifying, painful, and brutal experiences I have had in this lifetime. At the time, this was no Shangri-la, it was hell. True suffering, the kind that makes for good stories and defines our existence, does not unfold in any kind of controlled manner. It drowns us like a tsunami. The tsunami I felt during my short time in Dharamsala three years prior was the coalescence of a great deal of factors and phenomena, in Buddhism we might call this Vipāka, the result of karma--the fruition of karmic seeds, the ripening of past actions, the end result of the equation. Karma literally means action, Vipāka literally means result. It really couldn't be simpler. But that is enough Buddhist philosophy for today. Back to the issue of Dharamsala. In the three years since leaving Dharamsala and India and the greatest group of individuals I have ever been a part of, I have returned to the place of my greatest defeat. The place where the fruition of my past actions proved to much for me to handle and sent me packing. Though I left India, a little bit of India came home with me in the form of typhoid fever to ensure I paid my dues in full. The law of Karma-Vipāka is infallible; it cannot be cheated or avoided. You might wonder why I would ever want to go back to Dharamsala or why I look back on my previous time in India so fondly despite it ending so awfully. Often, we only see the negatives in unfortunate situations, especially when the situations are what we might define as tragic or terrible and we are in the middle of them. In a way, going home when I did was incredibly fortunate, for both myself and those who cared about me. I cannot begin to imagine the unfathomable suffering and fear that would have tormented my family if I had come down with typhoid fever in India. Don't get me wrong, the Indian medical system is excellent and they can diagnose and treat typhoid fever rather easily, but if your child were to come down with a potentially fatal disease more than 12,000 kilometers away on the other side of the planet Earth, I highly doubt that assurances of the Indian medical system's efficacy would do anything to assuage your worries. So for me, leaving India when I did and coming down with typhoid fever in Washington D.C., where my parents could see me and stay with me in hospital at any time and in a moment's notice was profoundly fortunate. In a way, I see it as the very best way for the very worst to have happened. Sometimes, and I am certainly guilty of this, we fail to realize that even when we experience awful phenomena, we can be quite lucky. After all, if you live to tell the tale, then not everything went wrong. I would like to talk more about the dissolution of my wrong perceptions of Dharamsala, and Tibetans, and Western tourists but I have already used up too much of this precious day and I would like to go for Kora around the Tsuglagkhang, home to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the primary gompa in McLeod Ganj, to hang up some prayer flags and then maybe go for a hike.

The Frequency is Courage,
- Doug B.