A Thought in Progress...

It is difficult to give an accurate portrayal of the last few days. I have met so many new people and tried so many new things. I guess I need to stress that while this is a physical journey, it is also a spiritual one. The life lesson is one of balance.

I decided to try meditating during my Thai massage today, which was rather ambitious of me considering all my trouble with meditating in the last couple of years. Something that once came naturally to me was thwarted by the way I had come to view the world. The effects of today's experiment, however, were amazing. It seems the massage lends itself to the meditative mind quite readily. Such clarity! It helped me to appreciate my own gifts and the gifts of others more, and to understand the importance of unity among people.

Chiang Mai is by definition a melting pot. People I have met here are from all over the world: England, the USA, Austria, France, China, Ireland, Australia, India, Greece, and of course the Thai people themselves. People here are so friendly compared to in Bangkok. There is very much a small town mentality. Their English seems better too, but it is Thailand and I am here to learn from the Thai culture, or perhaps more broadly, Eastern Philosophy. The East has a certain sense of balance that the West fails to achieve. The West is far too focused on the mind alone and I am beginning to see how that creates social illnesses. Everyday we see the horrors of sick and unrealistic sexual fantasies, wars based on fear, and television taking the place of a god. These things root themselves in the very nature of our condition, which is to forget about our physical and spiritual desires in favor of our minds. We ignore these needs for so long that they finally erupt in unhealthy forms, having been unable to capture our attention in any other way. This needs to change. There is a lot that Westerners could learn from the East.

When I first came to Thailand there were things about the very structure of the society here that deeply disturbed me. I was horrified by things that my Western mind could not understand. As I became more aware of the cultural contexts and beliefs that created these things I realized that there was really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. My limited Western view had caused me to find imagined problems in what I was seeing. These differences are just that, different from what I have been accustomed to in the past. In the West we hold high the idea of the individual and this shapes our worldview. In the East the ideal holds the benefit of the community at its core. To this end the whole society works like clockwork. What seemed bizarre and perhaps "wrong" is a perfectly fitting cog within this system. Everything runs as it should under this worldview, and I am beginning to wonder if it is not a healthier worldview.

Morality has proven subjective and therefore cannot be trusted. We must throw away this idea of how things should be and focus on why, instead, they are the way they are.