Vicarious versus Direct Experience

This in not a Himalaya! (it's a photo of one)

Before I even started on my journey back to Nepal, I discovered loads of journals written by me as a 22 year old. For weeks before I left LA, I stayed up every night past midnight reading them. It was a way to reconnect with my younger self and another time. It was like a journey back before the journey back, like being in two places, even two realities, at one time, during the day, teaching summer school, then during the night reliving my past with all the details and feelings flooding through me. Now that I’m in the middle of my real journey back, it has been a constant theme thinking about the quality of reading versus actual doing. I have thought about this at other levels as well, the reader who enters another world vicariously and doesn’t even notice how much time has passed. I used to be that sort of reader, and occasionally still am, though work and demands interrupt that thrilling world of reading. In another context too, I have been thinking about how much I like to blog about my experiences in Nepal and how I feel a kind of obligation to do so, with say a dozen or two dozen people reading my blog and around 1700 page views, though that statistic may be skewed by my own views as well. So I’ve been thinking about the reading and writing experience, which is rich and interesting, and is relevant for an English teacher, versus my interest in direct experience. Direct lived experience is a concept that I learned from a Tzogchen teacher, and I was enamored with it as a concept. It implied that one didn’t live in a dream world or in a world of preconceptions, but that one was directly experiencing lived reality moment by moment as it occurred. Of course this is a Buddhist ideal not easily achieved. I was very familiar that preconceptions and perceptions of reality routinely interfere with direct experience. Knowing the true meaning of what was happening meant not knowing how it really was. Belief was the enemy of actual being because beliefs can be so powerful and can interfere with what one really sees.

                But the diaries were rich and powerful and pulled me back into a time long ago. I was immersed in those earlier experiences, drawn in and consumed by them. For example, my best friend came to Nepal to visit me after one year in country, and my entries in my journal reconnected me with my enthusiasm for him as a person and my friendship with him. I saw him clearly for the first time in decades, and I saw what I really admired about him, his essence, which over time had been lost in the years of familiarity and habit. Other things too were fresh as if they were new. How back then I used to stay up late at night, walking in the dark on the road, to hear Nepalis singing, and how I recorded all the words and tunes to these songs. My passion and involvement in the culture were being re-created for me right before my eyes. So that is how I experienced reading the journals leading up to my trip, as immersive experiences that carried me away into a reality that seemed real. Being a reader was a transforming sensation that took over for me. I was loath to turn off the light every night, even though I was becoming more and more sleep deprived during summer school.

Actual village rooftops

                So now let’s look at direct experience, the thing I value highly, remembering that beliefs or preconceptions can make it difficult to feel what’s really going on. But the other thing I notice from direct experience on this trip is that the meaning of an experience is rarely apparent. For instance, I walked to the village of Hemja in the rain, not knowing why or where I was going. I was a little unsure and apprehensive, but once I start walking it’s really hard for me to stop. I’ve had this tendency all my life, I think, and I’ve walked for hours and miles in Texas, Colorado, Nepal, and California, unable to make myself see the sense in turning around. So I kept on walking until I saw a puja or festival, and was loathe to intrude, but intrigued as well. And then I was invited in, and bit by bit I entered the temple where the whole village was sitting on the floor experiencing the ecstasy of the religious music and the moment. I was immersed in this experience, and moment by moment it unfolded in front of my eyes and though it was like a dream, it was real, and dancers were dancing, stepping on me. Then I witnessed a dancing woman filled with the spirit of Krishna, and she was dancing in a trance for half an hour or more, nearly falling on me.

                So part of me was like a scholar, a musicologist or a cultural anthropologist, noting what was happening, thrilled to be witness to a happening that few westerners have witnessed. And then there was the immersion of my senses, not removed at all, in the middle of the action, stepped on occasionally, right there in my experience. I was filled with wonder and gratitude and feeling lucky that serendipity and good fortune had led me there without a plan, without preconception, just an open heart letting whatever experience might come take me away with it. So there was a part of me that was immersed, and a part of me that was in awe, sort of like meta-congnition, awareness of the awareness, that something special was occurring, and there was a part of me as well that had no idea of the larger meaning of it all, that couldn’t conceive of the larger picture, what it all meant, to be in the right place at the right time. So these different parts were all there, all partially aware of one another, none in supreme control, no perception dominating the others. I was in the moment as well, reacting to the smiles from children, who touched my legs to see if I were real.

                Then later that day, I immersed myself in recreating the experience with words (which I am doing now as well). I wanted to capture the feeling of the day, the importance of the moment, re-create the actual experience with sentences that would give me and the reader a sense of what happened and how momentous it was. Of course words can only record the shadow of the real, a traced record in language of real and vivid experience. Or is that true exactly? Can language sometimes transport a person to the world as it was or is imagined? Reading my diaries I had been transported. My ability to craft language to capture the world is limited by my writing skill. But to the extent that I can choose the right words and give sensory details (which I fear I have not done much in this piece of writing), details which evoke actual time and place, then perhaps I can transport myself and some readers to another world. In the end it remains an open question for me, language about experience versus actual experience. I have been a reader and a writer, so I tend to believe in the power of language to take us there, but I have also been immersed in experiences that were richer than words can describe. So perhaps I end this train of thought, which has been on my mind for weeks, with another question: Can we not have both the reading and writing about experience and the actual experience?  But which is richer or has the potential to be richer? I think in the end it depends on the reader and the experience: sometimes for some readers, language can take one into another world, and sometimes for some people direct experience can be all encompassing and transformative, just as at another time for another person that same experience might be felt with numbness, preconceptions, and ideas that don’t allow the realness in. I don’t know how to enable students to experience being transported by words, but I am one of those who language and experience equally move and I am grateful for both rich experiences. Keep the window panes clear, as Isaac Asimov once said, and be as fully present as one can be whether reading, writing, or experiencing directly.