9

The Maoists had asked for a ten day extension, to elect a Prime Minister and form a new Government, because they couldn’t agree on who should be Prime Minister. Now they’d managed to wrestle the ball from the other team they didn’t know what to do with it. They were very adept at blowing up shops and setting cars on fire, but they had no idea how to run a country.

            In much of Asia, as in the West though less blatantly, politics is not about serving the people, and the betterment of the country, it’s about inflated ego, and fattening your bank account. Corruption is endemic, rife, expected, and so accepted. A fish rots from the head down, and it is almost impossible to do business in many Asian countries without baksheesh, money under the table, a bribe.

           You can even get a seat on a fully booked bus for an extra twenty rupees, above the official fare, and, often, the official fare changes, if you happen to be a foreigner or a native and shout long and hard enough.

           The fighting in the streets was getting worse, the pro-Maoists were worried they might be losing the stranglehold on the country they’d finally got, after years of bombing shops, businesses, bus stations, setting cars on fire, or threatening to do so.

           In the Casinos, Indian employees were frequently threatened with death if they didn’t give up the job in favor of a native born Nepalese, and the anti-Maoists were making what they thought was a last ditch attempt to prevent a totally Maoist-led Government. Already, it seemed, the Maoists had taken over the press, and TV, showing little but Maoist propaganda.     

Jack called down to Reception to have food brought up all day, and left outside the door. They asked if there was anything wrong, because, if there was, they had a Resident Doctor on twenty-four hour call.

           He said no, not to worry, we were fine, and intended to stay in the room all day.

         ‘They say there was a time when people with an awakened consciousness practiced sexual tantra with an artistic and cultural lifestyle of pure bliss and harmony with each other and the universe, and lived in a state of enlightenment’ Jack said.

          ‘Sexual tantra is the art of spiritualizing sexuality and offers practical tools to transmute fear and attachment into love. Tantric sex is the letting go of all mental, emotional and cultural conditioning, the total surrender to what is so that universal life energy can again flow through us like a river without effort.

         ‘The word tantra has many definitions, and perhaps its real meaning has been lost to antiquity. Some scholars claim it comes from the Sanskrit or Hindi word for fabric or tapestry, meaning that it is woven into one's life. Others say that it comes from two Sanskrit words, tanoti and trayati.

         ‘Tanoti means to expand consciousness, and trayati means to liberate consciousness. Tantra expands and liberates consciousness, making it the fabric of existence. As the highest possible synthesis between love and meditation, tantra is the connection between this and other planes of existence.

         ‘While not a religious philosophy, tantra embraces a deep spiritual understanding of life, and an ancient art of living in harmony with yourself, and with others.

         ‘Sexual tantra was used as a vehicle to achieve cosmic consciousness and union with divinity. Tantra treats sexual energy as a loving friend rather than something to be suppressed or talked about secretly. It does not deny sex, or consider sex a hindrance to enlightenment, instead it says that tantra is the only spiritual path that holds sex as something sacred, not a sin, and doesn't tell you to suppress your sexual urges to reach god, but just the opposite. It supports development of this vital energy to achieve union with divinity.

         ‘The essence of sexual tantra is the full expression of being, a merging with, rather than a withdrawing from, and it is the ultimate yoga, a Sanskrit word for union.            

          ‘In tantric sex the orgasm is with the universe. You become part of the primal energy of everything, and merge your individuality with the Absolute.

          ‘It’s common for tantrics to drop the mind in tantric lovemaking. When the energy comes from a space deep within you, it connects you with you, with your partner, and with god, shifting you into an altered state of consciousness and into the realm of the spirit.

         ‘On the tantric path you learn to use sexual energy in an extended way, not denying the physical but going further, deeper, higher. You dance with the electromagnetic force field of your partner, and that dance leads to cosmic oneness. The difference between unenlightened sex and tantric sex is that sexual tantra declares the kingdom of God is within you.

         ‘In Sanskrit it is called Pinde So Brahamande, the physical body is the temple of God, and the body is the replica or representation of the entire Cosmos. Social and cultural structure supports separation, dualism, and has created division among people and nations, violence and war. Sexual tantra says we can celebrate life when the idea of separation, or dualism, disappears and allows people to meet on all levels of consciousness, physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

         ‘While most fundamentalist religions focus on the elimination of sensual pleasures, tantric sex welcomes the full expression of bodily pleasure, recognizing that in the body is hidden the 'bodiless' or the spiritual. If you can learn to be conscious of the body, you can be conscious of the Universe. What Buddha said can be said of sexual tantra, the truth of the Universe can only be realized within the framework of the physical body.

         ‘We create our own reality, and it can be anything we want it to be. It's possible to study tantric sex for years, learning technique, meditations, and the many nuances of the tantric lifestyle, but sexual tantra assumes you already are what you will become, and enlightenment is already yours’.

We had snacks, coffee for Jack, and orange juice for me.

         “Maybe the world, the universe, life itself, are not things out there, but just a collection of stories we tell each other. And the stories themselves have created the pictures, and those pictures are what we call reality. They might not always be tales told by idiots, signifying nothing, but they are stories, with pictures, nevertheless’ Jack said.

         “Mankind invents its own story, nations creates their own stories, as do different cultures, then individual stories arise, all meant to explain, find answers, and discover, how our being here fits in to the stories we have invented, never understanding that had we not created these stories in the first place, and go on creating them, we might not be here to even wonder.

         “The world, the universe, life itself, is not made of sub-atomic particles, atoms, and molecules after all, but stories. The only question then is, can we change the story? We’re doing it all the time, constantly re-creating ourselves, the world, and the universe.

         “Some cultures create stories about earth spirits behind the terrifying forces of nature, or gods on the highest mountains, or a single, omniscient, sky god, or the more modern story that we’re alone in an indifferent or mechanistic universe.

          “Reality is probably even more mysterious than our own stories tell us, and, at the very centre, the core, of this mystery, is the very consciousnesses that help us create our stories, our paradigms, our sense of existence. And we get closer to it with the newest story so far, experiencing the universe, instead of investigating it, as alive and ourselves as sustained within it, rather than alienated from it, and it’s this story that overcomes the profound feeling of separation and aloneness in the universe that has been the basis of almost every other story.

        “But stories take time to grow, to develop, to take hold of the imagination, and the mind. We’ve known for centuries the earth is a sphere, and turns on its axis, but we still talk about the sun rising and setting, and no matter how well we tell the new story of Quantum Physics, telling ourselves that matter is mostly energy and space, and our own minds probably construct the universe we are trying to investigate, it still seems solid, real, and objective.

        “We’re all storytellers, and all our stories may be relative and subjective, but not all are equally useful or probable, and we need all of the story, science and imagination, intellect and intuition, fact and fantasy, to help us truly understand anything at all.

        “We create stories to help us solve problems, and, often, only change them when the old stories are no longer adequate to solve present problems, and they sometimes lead to misunderstandings, and conflict, between nations, cultures, and individuals.

        “We fight, torture, and kill, to validate our own version of the story, forgetting it’s just a story. No one story, or single collection of stories, is enough for us to know who, or what, we are. All of them, even stories told by idiots or improbable, are needed, myth and magic, supernatural and superstition, rationality and common sense, to penetrate to the centre, the core, of the mystery we call existence.

        “The future will be whatever story mankind chooses, but there is no blueprint for changing stories. Suppressing older stories with violence or impassioned argument, or searching for absolute answers, has never resolved our problems or adequately answered our questions, and never will, but accepting the uncertainty of our stories might be the first step.

        “A new story, a better paradigm, is needed, which includes consciousness as a unifying element, imagination as a creative force in itself, and the understanding that we are not separate but one with the universe, that we are made of the same stuff as the stars, and they might not be out there but in here.                        

       “The fact is that, often, we have been conditioned from infancy to react in particular ways to certain situations and circumstances, and we have created the neural pathways to help us do this easily, and automatically, and also, unconsciously, evoke responses from others that conform to our learned expectations, hopes, and fears.

       “The chances are, what we expect to happen is more likely to happen to us than to someone who doesn’t expect it. What we believe is true, is true, or will be. We’re creating the world in which we live, moment by moment. What becomes a conscious thought, and what remains unconscious, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, even our circumstances, the situations we encounter, our relationships, are often determined by these same neural pathways and peptides.

        “We find ourselves getting into the same kind of relationships, having the same problems, or successes, the same arguments, or agreements, repeating the same mistakes, or right choices, over and over again, because when our receptors experience the same peptides they become less sensitive and need more, like a drug-addict, to be stimulated. We become addicted to certain emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and to experiences that generate these emotions, and unconsciously create the situations and circumstances in order to feed our addiction.

       “We’re not only neurologically conditioned to see, and relate to, others in pre-programmed ways, but we’re also addicted to our experiences. But the good news is that we can change, we can be re-wired, and cured of our addictions. We can be changed, and we can change the world we have created.

       “The first step is to find some way to help us change our story, our world view, no matter how long, and tightly, we have clung to it, because our current story is obviously not helping us solve our problems, and expecting the mind, which has caused the problems, to solve them is like expecting a policeman who has committed the crime to solve it – it just won’t happen.

       “This isn’t easy, and may be almost impossible for some, when they’ve spent most of their life with the same story, constantly reinforcing, and updating, their version of reality. Sometimes we have to hit rock bottom, experience a trauma, to change.

        “Suffering is not always necessary, change can happen through joy and sometimes does, but, sadly, few can make any fundamental change without it, can’t even change the way they sit on a chair without being motivated by discomfort.

        “Changing our story often means getting to the root of past wounds, the ones we re-enact in the present, because our present story has usually been created as a defense mechanism against the pain of a single past traumatic experience or a series of more subtle negative experiences, and we replay the past, often unconsciously, because the natural processes of dissipating the hurt at the time, for whatever reason, didn’t happen, and, sometimes, our present story is no more than a well disguised past, and, often, the full, uninhibited, emotional expression of it is all it takes to change the whole story.

        “Our reality is created by our world view. A religious person will have a different world view to the non religious, and have a different reality. If our world view is subjective, then the reality it creates is subjective, and if that’s subjective, we can change it. So, we must first, get a very clear idea of what our world view is.

        “Our world view, or paradigm, is the thing that gives us a sense of our relationship to everything else. It determines what we see, how we think, and what we do, and we rarely, if ever, question it because we don’t see it as a subjective idea but as a fact, and trying to see it objectively is like trying to see blue while wearing red-coloured glasses.

       “We can’t distance ourselves enough from it to see how much it affects our perceptions. We just assume we see things as they are because that’s the way they really are, but, the truth is, they are like that because that’s the way we see them.  

       “There are six basic world views, metaphors people choose to see the world – the world as a machine, as a battlefield, as a trap, as a classroom, as a lover, as self – and which one we choose determines the kind of world we live in.

       “Change that and we change our reality. It’s that simple, and that easy. Not magic, and nothing supernatural. It’s so simple most people think it’s too easy, and it’s so easy most folk think it’s too simple.

       “Most people today see the world as an inanimate object acting like a machine, and following mathematically predictable laws. It separates mind from matter, subjective from objective, science and religion.

       “In this view there is no room for magic, the paranormal, other worldly ideas. It’s a dead world of skeptics, and essentially deaf to issues that attempt to add meaning and purpose to human life.       

       “For others the world is a battlefield, either personal or religious. A harsh world where only the strongest survive, and the weak are destroyed, or it’s a constant fight between light and darkness, good against evil.

       “Love and compassion are weaknesses, and greed and self-righteousness are strengths.

       “For some the world is a trap, not something to fight but to escape from, and they have only contempt for material gain, possessions, wealth or power. They choose what they perceive as natural or spiritual paths to escape what they see as a greedy and materialistic world, and to climb higher, above it all.      

       “An alternate form of the world as a battlefield is the world as a classroom, a kind of moral gymnasium where you are put through certain experiences intended to test you and teach you life’s lessons.

       “Like the world as a battlefield, the world as a classroom is often an ongoing struggle, with both the physical body and the soul at stake.

       “The world as a lover is often religious, spiritual, other worldly, erotic and ecstatic, with desire as a creative force, and we feel ourselves embraced and loved by the primal and sensual play of life.

       “We become a lover, a worshipper, and mystical bride, of life itself.

       “The world as self is similar to the world as the lover, two halves of the same thing – the lover and the beloved have joined, no longer separate.

        “These two worlds are an interconnected whole, with each other and with themselves, and each individual an integral part of a living web of life. When we recognize our own perception of reality, and see it for what it is, subjective, it isn’t too difficult to change it, or exchange it for another.

         “The world as lover and as self is often the best curative and healing story there is. A primordial area of the human brain, far older than logic and reasoning, is the seat of emotional intimacy, of love. Love is older than the mind, deeper, and is connected, in a way beyond the mind’s understanding, to those close to us, and is part of the life-force of every human being.

       “This indescribable force, because it existed before words, determines our basic instincts, moods, stabilize, or disrupt, our psychological and physical health, and even changes the structure of our brains, so that who we are depends less on our past history and more on who we love”.

The Floor Supervisor called to ask if we were happy with the room, with the service, and when would they have the honor of our presence in the Casino.

        ‘Tomorrow …’ Jack told him ‘Everything is fine …’

        ‘Sounds like they’re getting a little impatient’ I said.

         Jack smiled, and nodded.

        ‘I know …’ he said ‘I know …’

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