Science dies Weeping,
Wisdom dies laughing
~Laxmi Prasad
These writings describe my improbable encounter
and subsequent relationship with a Himalayan spiritual master, which
began as a pilgrimage in the Himalayan mountains of Sikkim, a former
Tibetan Buddhist kingdom ringed by snow peaks bordering Nepal, Tibet,
and Bhutan.
It wasn’t a pilgrimage in the conventional
sense, a search for a holy man or holy place. Nor was it a search
for a famous cave or temple, though the land abounded in them. And
though when I set out on this pilgrimage I was wandering without design,
and even without aim, I was not without purpose. Instead of searching
for a place, I was on a pilgrimage in search of a very particular
time, the only time in which anything on this earth has ever happened—the
present moment.
As a seeker with nothing to seek, a traveler without
destination, my wish was simply to fully experience the present moment
that never becomes the future and never was the past. And from the
moment I set out on my experiment in present living, each moment unfolded
into a beautiful vignette—be it a smile on a face or a tight
little thunderhead rushing up a valley just as I was passing a small
cave in which I could take shelter, as if the mountains themselves
were upholding me and providing me shelter. Later, a cloud was clinging
to a mountainside with a waterfall flowing through it. The cloud simply
rose into the diamond blue sky and disappeared. By opening oneself
up to the moment, one allows the moment to unfold; one realizes everything
is like the passing of that cloud.
It was on my second day out that I followed a monk
on a shortcut to a place I didn't know, to a village and the very
house where an enigmatic lama was to stay, a spiritual master and
master of both the holy and absurd.
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