In my attempt to squeeze every little bit of life out of my remaining time in Sydney, I find myself doing increasingly bizarre things.
2 weekends ago I went to a meditation retreat at Nan Tien buddhist temple near Wollongong, the largest of its kind in the Southern hemisphere (although everything in Australia is allegedly "the largest in the Southern hemisphere"). It's a gorgeous site, and we got to wear proper robes and bow and stay silent for 28 hours.
Yes, you read that right. Me. I stayed silent for 28 hours, and that includes the night sharing a room with my 2 friends. Not a sound made its way through my vocal tract (apart from a muffled laugh or few), even when I was eating on a table with 5 strangers, doing tai chi or getting bowed to by a group of elderly tourists who, despite all my hair, my air of confusion and my less-than-noble gait, assumed me to be a real monk.
People go on about meditation and how it changes their lives and stuff. I was all set for this sort of realisation, but in fact just came to the conclusion that I really enjoy my constant and slightly oppressive cascade of random thoughts; getting rid of them just makes me uncomfortable. Or sleepy. So meditation is not for me.
Neither is Buddhism, apparently. I've always considered it one of the more palatable religions, but I'd never really considered how the idea of karma is so similar to, say, Christian ethics before. One of my many issues with Judeo-Christian ethical systems is that they are inherently selfish; don't be bad or you'll go to hell; act in a 'good' way and get to heaven in the end. This seems to me to be, in itself, negative, and so the whole 'holier-than-thou' attitude of hardcore Christians really pisses me off.
I thought karma was much more altruistic than that. Turns out its not. As the amazing Reverend Yo (this rad woman monk (nun?) with a shaven head and wicked shoe-socks) explained that there IS a hell in Buddhism, and that one has to act well in order to shake off your negative karma in order to progress to nirvana, I realised that it's pretty much the same thing. Shame.
I still think that atheist ethics are just fundamentally better; be good for the sake of being good. Of course, it also leaves open the possibility of being bad for the sake of being bad, but that's just the way it is. It just means that those who choose to act well are purely good people.
Last weekend was a lot less deep: I went to a 'doof in the bush', or for those English-speaking people amongst us, a tiny little electronic music festival 4 hours outside of Sydney. There were only 600 people there, mostly old hippies, young hippies, and weekend hippies, and it was fantastic. I've never been to such a positive event in my entire life; you made a million friends instantly, everyone pitched it, it was environmentally sound, and there was even tree-planting (which I would totally have joined in with, was it not for my physical inability to leave the tent apart from to crawl to the toilet vomiting at the time). I even met a bushtucker expert who gave me his card and promised to give me a bushtucker tour (no jokes) when I make it to the central coast! WOO HOO!
This weekend is my first in about 3 months for which I have no plans, and it's also my last before the Ukrainian gets here.....
Thursday, April 29, 2010
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