The Mountain Logs Day 9A - Travel to Gurudwara - The Pause

The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being. 

On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature. 

It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception. 

In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.  

Transcript

The Pause

Dear Friends

We would like to share a poem

A Snowflake In The Rubble

Sediments upon sediments 

Rock inside rock

In the clash of two continents 

Ethereal towers grow in shock

Womb within womb 

Mountains rise fold upon fold 

As the Earth’s prodigal baby

Sweats it out in abysmal cold 

Plate clashes with tectonic plate 

Thoughts upon thoughts accrue  

Erupting on a trembling surface 

Crushed into sublime residue 

Fault line to fault line

Sutured along a tender boundary 

You are now my very life line 

My heart .. my mind .. my sanctuary 

Birth after birth

Stream by stream .. pebble by pebble  

You absorb me into my earth 

Exhaling softly .. small and humble

I am a snowflake in the rubble 

It is 9:47 AM. Just messaged everyone, “there is a landslide close to Badrinath. We have to rush now. We will take lesser breaks today. We will have to cross that point before it gets dark”.

This is a seismically sensitive area of the Himalaya and early in the month the road to Badrinath was blocked for four days, wonder what’s in store for us.

Geologists say there’s lot’s happening below the surface of the Himalayan mountains.

Everyone is now easy with the unexpected.

Eyes open, taking the mountains in, letting them fill our minds. Every thought is a pebble, an image is a rock, an idea a tree, a poem a stream, the unending undulating folds, the snowy peaks, the river, the sounds, the sublime and the subliminal are now the very texture of our minds.

What is this landslide then?

A whole cascade of sediment, of sentiment, incessant stream of thoughts, crashing down to block our advance to our last station or maybe it’s just a pause created by the mountains, telling us, “wait, listen”.

“Just, listen”, they seem to say, “listen to this rubble”. 

These are the tallest mountains of the world. One would think that they should be made of harder stones, like granite, but no. It is largely made out of sediments, particles of sand, shells, pebbles and other fragments of material.

Gradually, the sediments accumulate in layers and over a long period of time harden into rock. They are soft and can break apart or crumble easily.

You want to understand something, or someone, then look at its origin story.

11:30 AM. We arrive at Chopta for a tea break. It feels like we have stepped back in time, a little bit of farming seems happen around here, the formations of the hills, the verdant forests, make you quiet.

On our way now, heading for Barahi, where we will stop for lunch.

2:00 PM. We arrive at Barahi, we are being served some delicious local variety of lentils, heavenly.

3:15 PM. We depart to Badrinath.

THE MOUNTAINS OF BADRINATH - SEDIMENT OR SENTIENT

Seems a celestial sculptor is at work. You just look at the forms of the mountains here and you enter another eon, another epoch. You feel, “yes we were there when India crashed into Tibet and their union gave birth to this prodigal child”.

Let’s call up the professor, would like to get to know a little about the genetics of this ethereal part of the earth.

He says, the Himalaya have large segments of sedimentary rock, small rocks and sediments pressed together which can easily degrade into a heap of rubble.

Like they say, strong and yet delicate.

Is that why when we are in turmoil? We approach them because  we find them very accepting of our own ‘melting pot’ state, because they have been like that for tens of millions of years.

SENSITIVE .. SEISMICALLY AND OTHERWISE

Not only are the Himalaya seismically sensitive, they are sensitive to everything, making of roads, traffic, building of shelters, crowd and maybe, our thoughts too, maybe.

It is great to provide access to common folk by creating infrastructure but any activity in the Himalaya are bound to create cascades of rubble, landslides, adding to the greyness of the waters. Professor Jha says, “unlike other mountains ranges, they cannot ever be stabilised after a construction job by reinforcing the dug out portions with concrete because their composition is brittle and they are still in their early stages of development. They are a job in progress, lots of changes are happening every moment. The speed of the Himalayan rivers are increasing, this is because the mountains are growing in height”.

Maybe foot trails are best suited to the Himalaya, just a thought.

Coming back to our discussion, at a mere 65 million years age, the Himalaya is still a baby. Sensitive like babies are, with lots of rapid and energetic developmental activities going on in the body and mind.

THE VERY MEANING OF ‘UNIVERSE’

Astrophysicists say that when stars collide, the heavier atoms like Iron get made, the iron in our planet too has been created in this way. Without iron in our haemoglobin, the oxygen would not bind with blood creating oxyhemoglobin and our hearts wouldn’t beat.

Evolutionary biologists say the first living organisms, single celled bacteria called ‘cyanobacteria’ converted carbon dioxide to oxygen over two billion years through photosynthesis, so that 800 million years back, the ozone layer would form and the first plants would emerge. We breathe what the plants exhale and the plants breathe what we exhale. We are their lungs and they are ours.

Where do we say this is ‘me’? That is the star and that the bacteria for without them we would not be able to breathe nor would our blood be able to keep us alive.

The ancients looked at the Universe as a single organism. The ancients had their specialisations like cosmology, metallurgy, medicine and so on but they looked at the whole.

They were Yogis first and in states of Samadhi or absorption, the barrier between the researcher and the subject ceases to exist, they did not have a need to divide material science from matters of the spirit. 

As the whole universe is one single organism, it can be argued that even our thoughts and ideas belong to the whole organism and so do we. We can therefore influence the whole Universe like our thoughts do influence every cell in our body and every cell in our body does influence our thoughts.

In the Tantra text ‘Pratyabhijna Hrdayam’, composed somewhere in the vales of Kashmir in ancient times, it is said, “the whole universe is a single body and each individual entity is the universe in its seed form”.

Is this landslide then an expression of the mountains, a response to all that is happening very much part of our dialogue with the mountains, with the Universe, with ourselves.

Let’s see if we may glimpse in the origin story of the Himalaya that elusive silken thread, the connects the spiritual and the material.

THE DRIVING FORCES

4:30 PM. Around two hours more to reach Lambgad, the hot spot for landslides, let us share what we gathered about the genesis of the Himalaya and a little about its nature from Professor Jha.

Professor V C Jha, is a world renowned expert on geomorphology and geo spatial technology, a Fellow at the department of atomic energy, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Dean of the Department of Geography at Vishwa Bharati, Shantiniketan. He has served as geographer at the National Remote Sensing Agency in Dehradun and has spent decades studying the Himalayan mountains.

Professor Jha says that “all landforms on earth are controlled and guided by energy, different forces of energy together keep the earth in equilibrium but things keep changing. If you come to the same spot in the Himalaya ten years later, you can see changes in the features of the landmass”.

“Because of heating and cooling”, he says, “there is constant disintegration, decomposition of landmass. It is called weathering and this is actually  controlled by electromagnetic radiation which primarily comes from the Sun. Solar energy is the great driving force.

COLLISIONS - PART OF OUR ORIGINS

Sixty million years back, a 10 km asteroid is said to have crashed into the earth. It had the power of a hundred thousand atomic bombs. It created humongous disruptions, massive earthquakes, tsunamis with waves reaching to heights of a hundred meters, 80 percent of all life including dinosaurs went extinct.

This is said to have been followed by a period of rainfall that is said to have lasted two million years and slowly life picked up with the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammalian evolution got a great boost, the seeds were sown for human beings to emerge.

Around the same time, another powerful event was occurring on the earth. The Indian and Tibetan plates were colliding. This was an event which was building up from a period of a hundred and fifty million years prior to the collision.

The earth didn’t always have seven continents as it has today. It was one single land mass called Pangea. Around 240 million years ago, one chunk of that continent broke from Pangea and started drifting away. It comprised of Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America and India. Around 140 million years ago, the Indian landmass is said to have broken out of this mother continent and began to approach another chunk of land which had separated from Pangea, the Eurasian land mass.

The clash between the Indian and Eurasian plates happened around 45 million years ago below the surface of the sea that separated them. India had not yet touched Tibet but their plates below were colliding.

GETTING DOWN TO EARTH 

The outer most layer of the earth called the lithosphere is broken into plates, which can be upto 30 kilometres deep, below the lithosphere is a sea of molten rock. Due to the high temperatures, the plates above on which both land and the ocean exist, literally float on this sea of molten rock which is in a constant state of movement. Because it is literally boiling, this movement causes convection where the hotter material comes up and the cooler areas go down, only to be heated again because the core of the earth is very hot. This creates ‘drifts’  in the plates and over hundreds of millions of years practically all the continents would have moved from their locations. This is a constant flux we live on.

Due to these tectonic forces,  the Indian landmass tore away from Pangea. When the Eurasian and Indian plates got locked in a powerful collision, just like what happens when you place a piece of cloth on a table and push two ends inwards, folds begin to emerge. The plates started to push the earth between them upwards and the land started folding and continues to this day.

The creation of the Himalaya has been a folding of the earth and a folding of the folds and creation of new folds. Professor Jha says the mountains are still growing in height rapidly, Mt. Everest has risen 10 meters in a 100 years.

What happened to the sea between the Indian and Eurasian plates? 10 to 15 million years ago, the surfaces that touched the Indian peninsula reached Tibet and as they got closer, the sea in-between called the Tethys sea was flushed out and the sediments in the Tethys sea formed the Himalaya.

A million years down the line, Professor Jha says that the entire subcontinent could look very different as it is continuing to thrust into the Asian landmass. The Indian plate is getting ‘subducted’ going under the less denser Eurasian plate. The older folds to the North will grow in height and new ranges will get created to the south.

The Landslides, earthquakes, massive upheavals changing the course of the rivers and the face of the mountains have been happening for millions of years. It is part of our life as the Himalaya. Let’s look at this as a pause we have gifted ourselves. Sharing a poem.

The Now

There occurs a pause .. abrupt 

When words cease to erupt 

A hollow engulfs the mind

A soaring urge to unwind  

A baggage of aching bones 

Few dreams made of stones 

The heart longs for a song  

And nowhere does it belong

The world .. a stranger indeed 

A query sleeps in a seed 

No answers echo in the deep 

Unquenchable thirst is the reap 

Then .. life turns around to ask 

“What is it that you want” 

Few tears trickle onto the lip

'Now' invites to take a dip   

6:45 PM. We are stuck. The landslide has blocked the entire road. We will have to abort our plans to end the day at Badrinath.

We have to look for accommodation and am told it is looking difficult here, as this is in the middle of nowhere. Our logistics team is good, they will find a solution.

8:00 PM. A Gurudwara has accommodation at the nearby Govind Ghat and there is a hotel too nearby, we split the group between the two places.

9.30 PM. Some of us are having delicious food at the Gurudwara, their accommodation and their spirit of service makes it feel that this was the plan but more delicious has been the surprise.

So we missed our destination, we were to stay in Badrinath.

A pause, unexpected, out of turn. If we look at ourselves as separate entities, then this is a landslide. An obstacle that has forced us to abandon our plans, we can curse the terrain or we can be good and say we have ruined the environment and as so this happens.

But if we look at the whole earth and the cosmos as one organism, then this event is part of our experience of the Char Dham. It is a glimpse into the workings of our larger body, our subtle body like we accept sunshine and rain. We see this as part of our own landscape and we have gifted ourselves a pause.

The pause is where we unwind without a pause, we experience but will not be able to digest and absorb, specially the deeper and more abstract experiences.

In learning theory, it is said that after learning to perform a task, when we leave a gap where we don’t perform the task, the learning gets better absorbed. We can see how when we come back to a skill after forgetting it for a few weeks or months, we actually get better at it.

It happens when there is a pause in a process 

Here we had not planned it, yet it gets created.

This is a Yatra. It is real.

Birth after birth 

Stream by stream, pebble by pebble  

As you absorb me into my earth 

Exhaling softly… small and humble 

I am a  snowflake in the rubble

Lots of Love 

Bharat Thakur