Herodotus “the world’s first reporter” Åsne Seierstad

Iraq can only be ruled by force,” a senior Ba’ath official told me in 1999. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state,” Bell wrote to her father on December 18 1920.

Published in 2003,  A Hundred and One Days describes Åsne [...]]]>

Hundred And One Days
By Åsne Seierstad

Herodotus “the world’s first reporter”
Åsne Seierstad

Iraq can only be ruled by force,” a senior Ba’ath official told me in 1999. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state,” Bell wrote to her father on December 18 1920.

Published in 2003,  A Hundred and One Days describes Åsne Seierstad’s stay in Baghdad during the build up to and capture of the city by the US forces in the early part of the year.

The book is a graphic account not only of a city and its people under extraordinary threat; it is also a vivid representation of life as a modern war correspondent.

The book triggered a diverse discussion for the group. As well as considering the work as a piece of literature, we also considered the role of contemporary war correspondents. We debated what purposes they served and how they reconciled their duty to report the truth whilst facing real life-threatening hazards and working under the equally threatening watch of the officially appointed minders. We also considered the pressures of working in a world that demands instant news, 24 hours a day.

A Hundred and One Days as a book

Overall the group members were glad to have read the book although no one claimed to enjoy it. We all felt “enjoy” would not be the most appropriate word given the detailed descriptions of the carnage wreaked by both sides in the course of the capture of Baghdad.

One member expressed the generally felt view that our reaction to the book was coloured by our attitudes to the war itself. There was a widespread view that we had found ourselves at war in Iraq before all the alternatives had been truly exhausted. Another recalled her euphoria at Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997, and how devastated she felt when he lead us into that war in the face of widespread popular opposition.

For some, the style of the book grated a little, one person noting that it was very episodic, like cribs from a journalist’s notebook. There were times, she felt, when the insights were thought-provoking – “In Iraq we are ready for war, like you are ready for winter” – but for the most part it lacked reflection on the situation. Generally personalities were painted with a broad brush stroke, with little development. However, others felt the book came alive when she got very close the fighting and to the immediate aftermaths of artillery attacks.

Several of us found her idiosyncratic punctuation a bit of a trial. In particular, her failure to give hardly any clue, with italics or with quotation marks, when she was quoting direct speech, caused us to trip up on many occasions.

One member found the first 30% of the book slow going, feeling it focussed too much on how she felt, and her complaining that people wouldn’t talk to her. Even when she did infrequently find people to talk to her, he felt her questions were sometimes a little fatuous. However, he agreed the pace picked up as the regime’s grip on power, and in particularly the power to control the news reporting, diminished.

We all felt her writing was at its best when she gets caught up in the action, especially in her visits to hospitals, and markets that had been struck by artillery fire, friendly or otherwise. It was at these points when she is very effective in recounting all the angst of the situation.

The Role of the Contemporary War Correspondent

The first point we recognised was the tremendous courage, tenacity and resourcefulness of Åsne Seierstad and war correspondents in general when they report on modern warfare. The book brought home to us all the reality behind the images we have grown used to seeing nightly on our television screens. What we seldom see on our screens is the unmentionable fear that Seierstad herself (and presumably others) experience on a daily basis as they go in search of stories.

Seierstad asserts in the Preface that “things happen all the time but the viewer only sees the outcome;” the skill of the successful journalist is knowing how to be at the right place at the right time, with the (not inconsiderable) technical resources to report on those “things happening”.

The group focussed at length on the question of why we have war correspondents, what their role is and who they serve.

The author gives different versions of the journalist’s role at different times. In the preface, she says:

My remit as a journalist in the chaos of war was not to judge, predict or analyse. It was to look, ask and report.

But just a few pages later she tells us:

I am here to find dissidents, a secret uprising, gagged intellectuals, Saddam’s opponents. I am here to point out human rights violations, expose oppression.

Far from avoiding the roles though, today’s correspondents (Åsne included) are daily called upon to judge, predict or analyse at least as much as they look, ask and report. News coverage often takes the form of waiting for information, just as much as the reporters on the ground wait for something to happen.

How often we witness the anchor person in the studio padding out a story – cutting back and forth between reporters or expert commentators, teasing out nuggets of background information, commentary, speculation and even the journalist’s own “take” on events – whilst waiting, as it were, for the war to start, for the “breaking news” to break.

Comments such as “We are expecting the President to give a press conference at any minute, John, but in the meantime, what do you think he is likely to say?” are the nightly stuff of contemporary news programmes.

As we progressed in the meeting, it became evident that the role of the modern war correspondent is far more paradoxical than we first imagined.

With modern technology they have the ability to report on events in real time, from anywhere in the world. However, they have to do so within boundaries set by all sides in the conflict:

• nominally they are required to be impartial and even handed, but covertly to uphold the values of the “folk back home”;
• they are constrained by official minders not to be too critical of the enemy;
• they are constrained by their employers at home not to make it too gruesome;
• they are supposed to be ever ready with an explanation, an opinion, a spot of analysis;
• some of us observed that correspondents were also constrained by their ability to speak Arabic or other local languages and also their awareness of local religious and cultural mores[1].

In today’s digitally intertwined world there is an apparently limitless supply of information, so much so that the possibility of information overload is an ever present risk. One person observed that she felt she had lived through every single conflict herself.

This raised the questions for us of why we want all this, why do we have war correspondents, what is their purpose:

• Is it to somehow legitimise the actions of the “goodies” whoever they are?
• Is it to criticise the action of the “baddies” (likewise, whoever they are?)
• Is it to be our “expert” on the ground, asking the questions we want answered from the generals and politicians?
• Is it to make us observers feel part of the struggle?
• Is it to help change something by galvanising one side to take action against the other side?
• Is it perhaps to persuade one set of individuals to change their ways, so they conform more closely to a set of ideals that another set of individuals deems to be somehow “right” or “better” – such as the imposition of democracy perhaps?
• Is their role, at least in part, to be used by the enemy in an attempt to get across their side of the argument to the audience at home?
• Or is it simply to fill news slots with stuff that is in some way seemingly timely but mostly “entertaining”?

One member quoted a passage from Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,”

Entertainment is the supra ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted. . . the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the news casters to “join them tomorrow”. What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept their invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say.

This was written back in 1985, before Facebook, Twitter, internet in every home and a television in every room! How much more do we accept being entertained to death today?

The Pressure of 24 hour News

One of the features of modern war reporting – which was clearly brought out in the book – is the voracious 24 hour media monster’s ceaseless demand to be fed.

Come what may, the pressure is on to come up with a story, often in the face of bullets and bombs, frequently despite the strictures placed upon them by the ever present “minders”, and always within a very tight time frame.

Sometimes the stories are all too plentiful; many are so graphic or so heart- rending and poignant as to render any words of the correspondent superfluous or even trite. Tellingly, one member said that one of his preferred styles of news coverage is the “No Comment” element of Euro News where the pictures are allowed to “speak” for themselves.

Another member pointed out how the ability to report instantly on events anywhere in the world shapes contemporary news programmes. Only 100 or 150 years ago the absence of speedy communications media meant that wars could be fought and won or loss before the civilian population “back home” knew that the war had even started.

Now, with the odd notable exception, news blackouts of conflict are rare, and senior military and civilian officials are generally complicit in so-called news management, in order to show their deeds in the best possible light, including playing down their own casualties, explaining “friendly fire” incidents and exaggerating enemy losses [2] These days, they even “embed” correspondents alongside their troops, partly to act as first hand witnesses and also to be on hand to cross examine the generals during the course of hostilities.

Easily within the life time of most group members, the interruption of scheduled programmes used to be a rare event, reserved generally for the death of the head of state or the outbreak of war. Now even routine events cannot wait until the next scheduled news bulletin; in its rush to be first with the news, the BBC for example will regularly curtail a scheduled programme to bring some “breaking news”[3].

War and the Truth

In this context the group considered the degree to which news could be trusted any more. With ever greater and deeper coverage and the demands for 24 hour news, we felt less sure about how much we could trust the news we were hearing.

In Asne Seierstad’s book, as one member observed, the Ministry of Information in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was straight out of George Orwell’s novel 1984, in the way it was able to delude itself into believing its own propaganda.

Regardless of whether it was first uttered by Dr Samuel Johnston in 1758, Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1917, or by Arthur Ponsonby’s In 1928, we all felt that the book affirmed for us the oft-quoted aphorism that “the first casualty when war comes is truth”.

Today, the demands by the media for ever more news complement the requirements of governments and military commanders to present their efforts in the best possible light; add into the mix the need for the on-the-spot reporter to give a two minute “expert” analysis of rapidly changing events whilst bullets fly all around, and the chance that the resulting news reflects any kind of objective truth begins to look rather slim.

At the level of our own experience, those of us who have been involved in a news event noted how often what appears on the screen or on the page bears scant resemblance to what actually happened before our eyes. How much more is the truth likely to become the first casualty in a war zone?

However, as two members mentioned, there is nothing new about truth being a casualty of war. Often it has been not so much overt propaganda as the withholding of information for tactical advantage.

For example, a controversy still surrounds the devastating bombing of Coventry in World War II when some people believe that Churchill knew the raid was going to happen, because he had access to intelligence gleaned from the Enigma code breaking successes at Bletchley Park, but allowed Coventry to be sacrificed rather than compromise the source of the information.

Another example was the belief that Churchill knew, from the same source, that the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbour but withheld the information so as not to compromise the source and, some would add, to ensure that America entered the war.

We concluded that war by its nature has always been messy but these days news, riddled through with comment and “spin”, becomes ever less trustworthy. It is indeed a paradox that, despite the most advanced means of communication the world has ever known, news as a representation of the truth seems ever further from our grasp.

Contemporary journalism and the truth

The book acted as a catalyst for us to discuss journalism in general and the degree to which we can rely on what we read in our newspapers or see on our television screens. As a group we recognised that news coverage of any sort is frequently distorted by the prism of editorial bias; the personal opinions of programme makers and newspaper owners often slant stories in favour of one view or against a contrary view. Most topical at the moment are the controversies over Rupert Murdoch’s News International organisation and the scandals which are currently being investigated in the UK.

One member suggested that Fox News doesn’t even seem to bother with the facts, simply making things up as they go. Someone he knew was employed by Fox News as a “fact checker” – but any corrections that the fact checker introduced were simply ignored in the final version if they did not fit the story the channel wanted to tell.

Contemporary Journalism and Self-Censorship

Self-censorship happens for many reasons and this is especially true in a war context.

As the author notes, often the journalists cannot report what they want to report because “a visa is too precious to sacrifice for the sake of one crushing report”. In other words war correspondents are obliged to tell less than a full version of the truth, to self-censor, to preserve their ability to continue reporting. It is interesting in recent events in the Middle East “Arab Spring” that repressive regimes have tried initially to keep foreign journalists out of the conflict areas and then, as in the current book, required reporting to be controlled by minders.

In one of the few lighter moments in the book, the author touches on the absurdity of the relationship between her and her first minder Takhlef:

What sort of a game is this? How much longer must I praise Saddam’s shining hair? How often will Takhlef boast about the victories of the revolution……… He knows he is lying, he knows I know he is lying; he knows I am lying, he knows that I know that he knows I am lying.

Another form of self-censorship is evident in the way images and events witnessed by war correspondents are “sanitised” because someone somewhere deems the images seen by the reporter to be too gruesome.

We assume most reporters, on a human level, do not want to witness people being blown up, or tortured, or physically and mentally abused, but as searchers for truth, these are the very things they are obliged to seek out and witness.

One telling passage from the book, where the author is reporting on the missile that hit the market at Al Nassar and what she saw at the mortuary:

This is what the reader and the television viewer do not see, nor the politicians and the generals. It is too gruesome to publish. But those who are in the morgue that evening will carry the pictures with them forever.

As the author says on another occasion, after a particularly emotional visit to a hospital:

A dead child’s face is too strong an image for the international press. But this is what war is about – people dying.

The Effects of Repression and War on Civilians

We were interested to read street level accounts of how repressive regimes work and how the people themselves cooperate willingly in self-imposed censorship for fear of being exposed and risking punishment or even death at the hand of relatives and neighbours, even one’s own children One member recalled the woman who takes her husband’s place at work. When she persistently asks where her husband is, she is told if she asks again her brothers and sons will be arrested.

However someone else pointed out that social media such as Facebook and You Tube and the wide availability of mobile phones with cameras provide routes which bypass the authorities to reach the wider world.

Of course not everyone the author met had the same view of the invasion. In the book it became evident that one’s position in society governed one’s reaction to the regime. Asne’s translator/minder Aliya is a case in point. Most of us had some sympathy with her. Middle class, educated, on the ‘right’ side of the religious divide, she believed whole heartedly in Saddam Hussein almost to the end, when a sliver of doubt slips into her mind. Even when she was faced with the evidence, she reads the 99 names of Allah[4] inscribed on ceiling of presidential palace, as a way of getting away from the situation she hates.

Sanctions affect ordinary people in paradoxical ways. Generally, the more sanctions bite, the more the people depend on the tyrants in power.

One particularly striking passage for some of us was when Asne was in a café just before the invasion and she reflected on how ordinary people in our own countries would feel if all these journalist suddenly turned up in time for an imminent invasion, simply to report on the almost certain defeat of the country.

We could all answer that question easily – we wouldn’t like it one bit. But would the price be worth paying if it meant the removal of a tyrant and freedom for an oppressed people? We could probably answer that too.

The real tragedy in this case seems to be that there was no good workable plan for what happened after the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down.  Even today, 10 years on, it would be a brave person who could state categorically that the price was worth paying. We wonder what Seierstad would say.

The general consensus was that two books – though both were found to be easy to read as well as interesting – were too much [...]]]> Civilisation:  The West and the Rest
By Niall Ferguson

The Super-rich shall Inherit the Earth
By Stephen Armstrong

The new global oligarchs and how they are taking over our world

The general consensus was that two books – though both were found to be easy to read as well as interesting – were too much to prepare for discussion.  Most of the discussion focused on Niall Ferguson’s Civilization though all were agreed that Stephen Armstrong’s work was quite scary.

Of the six “apps” Ferguson suggests make the difference between the West and the rest, namely competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and work, the Protestant work ethic was discussed first as possibly the most important.  However, the point was made that poverty and illness create a dichotomy with Christian assuredness that wealth is a sign of God’s approbation.  Also, other cultures take the afterlife as God’s approbation, but of course that is Ferguson’s point.

Having said that, this raised the question of what we thought civilization is – particularly as one can put up many objections to all of Ferguson’s six “killer apps”.  Being able to live alongside people fairly, that is, civility highlights the point Ferguson makes for the rule of law as one of the “killer apps”.  And also that without religion it is thought there would be mayhem.  By contrast social anthropologists regard coercion, the very thing religion is against, as the foundation of civilization.  In other words, when the individual no longer takes the law into his or her hands and gives up this right to the state, then we begin to be civilized.  But the need for institutions for there to be civilization brought us back to Ferguson and his six “killer apps”.  The point was made that whatever civilization is, according to Ferguson, Western dominance rests on the institutions directly related to the six “killer apps”.

This brought up other definitions of civilization; that it is a cultural entity with common objectives, such as customs, language, history and religion.  Or that when a state was founded religion played as much a role as war, which led to a discussion of the origins of the state with regard to countries such as China and Egypt.  Objection was raised to the state being the defining basis of civilization on the grounds that civilization cannot be said to exist without human rights, tolerance, justice and the rule of law.  This was supported with reference to the loss of rights suffered owing to the Patriot Act in the USA.  However, it was pointed out that without food, water and a roof over our heads none of these can possibly exist.

The discussion then returned to the role of religion.  Did the growth of Sufism in Islam prevent Moslems from developing scientifically given that a Sufi disciple was totally focused on the founder of the order and his lieutenants claimed to have seen God and consequently knew everything?  Or was it Judaism or the fact that Jews were banned from agriculture and the military that made Jewish people so successful both financially and academically?  Given the number of things that could be discussed with regard to religion, that is its role in two of the “killer apps”, namely science and work, it was pointed out that Ferguson could be said to be oversimplifying.  For instance, is there a move away from religion in the West just because church attendance has fallen?  What does the spread of Protestant Christianity in China auger?

This moved us to discuss Ferguson’s point with regard to Weber’s observation of the variety of churches in the US, whereas in Europe and elsewhere state and religion were part of the same power structure.  Is the key to Western dominance the freedom of the individual?  To own property, go to any church he or she likes and so on, including ownership in companies?  The point was made that both Ferguson and Armstrong appear to be saying that the more resources are concentrated in fewer hands, the less freedom there is, unless of course you are in power.  This raised the question if that is why the US has been the dominant power during the 20^th century?  An answer was that Ferguson thinks it is the combination of the “killer apps”, which brought the discussion back to the relationship between civilization and resources, and whether or not the US was a democracy given the concentrations of power in lobbies and the media.  it was argued that the question as to whether there were enough resources for everyone to enjoy the benefits of civilization has been overcome throughout history through science, technology and other means, albeit by possibly reducing quality, such as in clothing which has moved from furs, to woollens, to cotton, to synthetics.  With regard to whether or not the US was a democracy again the objection was raised that there it was bottom up and any distortions would eventually iron themselves out as they had in the Guantanamo interrogations – though Guantanamo remains.  Counter arguments to this focused on ignorance, that is, to have democracy you need to have an educated and knowledgeable electorate – something Europeans think is missing in the US.

This raised the question of what the group thought civilization was.  One immediate answer was the French Revolution and hence the Rights of Man, to which nobody objected.

This brought the group to consider whether or not China could replace the West as the dominant global force.  Consensus was that by all accounts they were too aggressive and repressive to become more than rich.  In other words, control of resources does not make you civilized, only dominant.  The group tended toward defining civilization as the ability to be concerned for people other than just oneself and while agreeing Ferguson had raised a good question(s) he had not only oversimplified some issues but overlooked important aspects – such as the sixties, which the group agreed was not about Eros but more about gaining power for the people. We finished with personal stories about China and documentaries we had watched concerning it, which underlined the view that while it may grow dominant in the near future it and all the other BRICS countries were still a long way from being civilized in the Western sense.

The discussion then reverted to the role of science in western civilization, in which context the point was made that while the Enlightenment was applied top down in Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and hence in the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey, it was the coffee-shops of London – the various clubs and societies – that really drove the scientific and hence industrial cum technological revolution. In other words nobody stood over you to say what you had to invent.  The objection that was raised to this reiterated that necessity was the mother of invention, which is why northern European countries came to dominate the world.  Germany was given as an example in that what motivated them was the lack of land; manufactured goods enabled them to buy the food to feed themselves, and hence their superiority over all others in Europe.  The discussion continued on this point until the end.

In summary, one point of view was that survival is the motivating force of civilization, which is defined by science.  Another questioned that the West was civilized in the way Ferguson claimed.  The more generally held view was that civilization is best defined as civility as science and commerce can be replicated.

The next meeting will be on June 28, at the same time and place.  The book is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins.

In closing I would like to thank you all; for my part I thought it was a really enjoyable discussion that makes me look forward to our next meeting. I hope it was the same for everyone.

“Even the most blemished readers will feel they could improve their spirituality without really trying if they spent [...]]]> A Journey in Ladakh, Encounters with Buddhism
By Andrew Harvey

Andrew Harvey wrote A Journey in Ladakh in 1983, two years after his visit to this most remote corner of India, on the border of Tibet.

“Even the most blemished readers will feel they could improve their spirituality without really trying if they spent more time in Ladakh”.
Martin Amis

“When he started waxing poetic on the mountains or the light at high altitude, I knew exactly what he meant, but felt nothing of what he was probably feeling”
Amazon reviewer

Born in Southern India in 1952, Andrew Harvey became interested in Buddhism when he was at Oxford in the early 1970s.   At the beginning of the book Harvey explains what he found attractive about Buddhism:

•  Buddhism’s “ calm and radical analysis of desire”
• “Its rejection of all the self-dramatising intensities by which (Harvey) lived”
• “The promise of a possible, strong and unsentimental serenity”

A little later, after his meeting with the old woman Oracle, he reveals more about his attraction to Buddhism:

“part of my love for Eastern philosophy had been a desire to  have done with (his) inner violence once and for all”

At the age of 25, he decided to leave Oxford and return to India for a year.   He wrote:

“I felt frustrated by my life and the limitations of my poetry, its obsession with irony and suffering, its largely unremitting anger and hopelessness”

Armed with a little knowledge of Ladakhi and Hindi, in July 1981he headed for Leh, the capital city of Ladakh.   He stayed there for about 8 weeks, moving around in a 60 km radius of Leh and meeting a troupe of characters which could be straight out of the – as yet unmade – film Carry on up the Karma:

• his first guide Ahmet, Leh’s answer to Bodrum’s indefatigable “hello boys”;
• Dilip the successful businessman and  desperate older Brahmin having a last throw of the salvation dice and his down to earth, voice of humanity wife Meneesha;
•  Hans, visiting professor of psychology from New York and self styled “academic voyeur;
• Loti, westernised Tibetan, failed monk, former partner of an American woman, father of her child and, for the author, marijuana smoking partner;
• Jam Yang, the failed, drunk  Tulku, scratching  a living as a disenchanted guide;
• the colourful, delightfully wicked blasphemous antique dealer, George Perec;
• the “fluent, witty, precise, vain” Charles, Swiss Buddhist, Ladakhi art expert
• And we should not forget the author’s sometime translator, guide and occasional mentor Nawang Tsering[1].

However the person to have the most profound effect on the author was of course Thuksey Rinpoche (last syllable rhymes with “hay”), indeed this meeting forms the heart of the book and perhaps the start of Andrew Harvey’s career as “a renowned and distinguished mystical scholar, Rumi translator and explicator, poet, novelist, spiritual teacher and writer, and architect of Sacred Activism”.[2]

Like many of the books we have read recently, this one worked on several levels.  On one level, it was a travel book, taking us to the remote state of Ladakh, a place that few of us had even heard of.  At another level, it was a book about the Buddhist faith, giving us insights into the beliefs and practices of this ancient religion and its links to Western philosophical thought.   Finally, it was a deeply personal account of one man’s journey of spiritual growth and fulfilment.

Bringing the three elements of the book together, one of the blurbs on the most recent edition describes the book as Harvey’s “spiritual travelogue” and notes that his “spiritual journey is connected at every point by the geographical[3]”.

THE BOOK AS A TRAVEL GUIDE

For some of us, the parts of the book which really shone were the “travelogue” elements. Andrew Harvey wrote poetry at Oxford and his origins as a poet become most evident when he is striving to describe the scenery, the culture and the people of Ladakh.  His accounts of the various festivals and rituals are exceptionally good and more than make up for the absence of the guide book photographs which travel writers love to include. He is extremely good at conjuring up the colour, the excitement and the texture of the culture he is observing.

However, this enthusiasm for the places he sees and the people he meets is not without risk, as he discusses at one point in the book.  One of the themes that the author returns to from time to time is the threat to Ladakhi culture and beliefs from the incursion of the West with its alien values and concepts.    One of the dilemmas facing Andrew Harvey in writing the book was that he was, in his words, “appropriating” the customs, life, beliefs of the Ladakhi people for his book and risking the very destruction of their way of life that he wants to protect

There is a cruel irony therefore in the fact that he does a very good job of making this remote and traditional place very attractive to the adventurous traveller.

As evidence of how successful he and those that followed him have been in depicting Ladakh, have a look at the website http://www.leh-ladakh.com/ladakh-fairs-festivals.html for the “entertainments” on offer.   There is even a Nawang Tsering shop in Leh http://khagta.photoshelter.com/image/I0000F.Wipq4FxBg

There is nothing new in sensationalising this part of the world.   If the word of our local hero Herodotus is to be believed, Ladakh was the Land of Wonderful Ants – nearly the size of dogs – that threw up gold as they built their nests.   No wonder people flocked to pay a visit.

One minor criticism we made of the book was the absence of a glossary.   A book about a remote, relatively untainted corner of India;   about a culture totally unfamiliar to most outsiders; about  Buddhism, one of the world’s more esoteric religions – no surprise then that we all felt a glossary would have eased our own journey through the book.    (A brief glossary is attached below).

At the level of travelogue, one member summed up our feelings when she said that she had enjoyed the book because it was as a gateway to a place so completely different from anywhere she had ever known.

She also said she was pleased to have read this book because it related to an area “just over the mountains” from the main setting of Greg Mortenson’s book, “Three Cups of Tea” which we read as a group last year.

THE BOOK AS GUIDE TO BUDDHISM & RELATED PHILOSOPHIES[4]

The group found the coverage of Buddhism in the book both enlightening and also rather daunting at times.   At the beginning of the book, some of the group felt that they had only the vaguest of notions of what Buddhism was about and what Buddhists believe.

We felt that our knowledge was now marginally better than before, having read the book.  We discovered a faith that rooted in humankind, with no God[5], no notion of an everlasting soul, but with a belief in a constant striving for perfection by each person for the whole of created life, which sees the oneness of the whole universe, with the ultimate goal of  ending the cycle of rebirth by achieving the state of Nirvana.

In one of the more comprehensible passages in the book, the message of Buddhism seems to encompass:

• Transience  of all things
• We should not take ourselves too seriously
• There is little ultimate truth in grief or misery
• Real wisdom is in joy, real wisdom in happiness[6]
• The true wisdom is that of the Buddha
• The end of Buddhism is to be freed from a false perception of the Self
• To understand that there is Nothing and No-one is also to understand that one is in Everything and Everyone, that there is no death no pain, no separation.

There seems to be a message of hope behind the beliefs of Buddhism, particularly where it diverges from other world religions in placing Man at the centre of its doctrine:

(Buddhists) “do not believe that man is a flawed animal;  we believe that he is capable of perfection.   Buddhists do not believe in God, they believe in man and the transforming powers within man”

We were struck by the fact that, whilst of the surface,  Buddhism is  represented as a religion which purports to be simple but which in fact is extremely complicated and difficult for Westerners to understand.   Most of us felt confused by the notion of the ultimate goal of Buddhism being the End of Ego, the End of Self, and the achievement of Sunyata (Nothingness).   The Rinpoche says

“But what remains when everything falls away?  Nothing, Emptiness, Sunyata.  There is no real Self    There is no final identity.  No God, No Soul, No Absolute.  Only Sunyata”.

And a little later:

“To be freed from a false sense of the Self is the end of Buddhism;  to realise that there is nothing and no-one is also to understand that one is in everything and everyone, that there is no death, no fear, no pain, no separation”.

None of us could reconcile the exhortation for Buddhists to be compassionate to all creatures with the need to strive for an end of Self, for an end of Ego. In the absence of a Self, of an Ego, who or what is going to be compassionate?   Even more bemusing was the idea that one character was meditating on what he claimed were “16 types of Nothingness”.

On the whole, however,  we all agreed that Buddhism seemed to be a very human centric religion; it seemed to us to understand human beings, with all their failings, better than some other religions.   We felt too Buddhism felt less like a book of rules and more based on human beings, their needs and feelings.   One member pointed out the idea, expressed by the Rinpoche that

“Everyone and everything is Buddha…..it is not a question of becoming it is a question of uncovering what you really are”

In its focus on human beings, it also seems to be a religion which encourages people to have a sense of humour and not to take themselves too seriously.    For some of the characters populating the book, there seemed to be no conflict between focussing on the most profound, abstract, spiritual thoughts at one moment and a little later drinking the local alcoholic liquor, joking, smoking marijuana and even “visiting” neighbours’ wives when their husbands were away.

For one member of the group, some of the underlying ideas of Buddhism reminded him of some of the areas he covered when studying Western Philosophy as a student.  It came as a surprise to him that ideas he associated with the rationalist philosophers of the 17^th and 18^th centuries could trace their origins back beyond Greek philosophy to Buddha in the 5^th century BCE.

For example, one of the elements of Buddhism which he recognised was the philosophical notion that the world might be merely a construct of the human mind.   After all, the argument goes, our route to the world is through our senses.   Since our senses can deceive us at times (our perception of heat/cold is relative, injury or drugs can alter our sensory states, colour awareness can vary) should we rely on them to tell us about the world?

We know too that other sentient creatures perceive the world differently.   For a dog, whilst her colour awareness is believed to be rather more limited than our own, her sense of smell is about a thousand times more sensitive.   A customs officer may suspect we are trying to get round the law but it takes a dog to confirm it. If our senses are unreliable, we cannot be certain that the world is as we perceive it.

(For those interested in dogs, their colour perception and heightened olfactory talents  see http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Do_dogs_see_in_color_or_black_and_white and http://knol.google.com/k/canine-senses-how-dogs-smell# ).

Consideration of these differences, either natural or artificially created, make philosophers very cautious about claiming the world is as we perceive it.   It might be totally different and we have no way of knowing.

Buddhism claims that ultimately everything is a construct of our minds but where it gets complicated is that Buddhism includes Self in this analysis.   Ultimately Buddhism seeks to deny the Self.

“To understand Emptiness (Sunyata) is to understand that everything is contingent, that all things arise contingently, that nothing has absolute reality, only a present, contingent reality”.

“To understand that all connections are of the mind, all notions of Selfhood or Personality are fictitious created by the mind for its own purposes, for the purposes of the Ego, which itself is a fiction.”

The 17^th century rationalist philosopher, Rene Descartes, recognising that the senses are fallible, set about doubting the existence of anything that depended on the senses.   After all, he said, all that I see could be a dream or the work of an evil demon.   This methodology came to be known as Cartesian scepticism.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_doubt .

Eventually, this led him to conclude that he could be sure of only one thing = I think therefore I am (the famous cogito ergo sum conclusion).  For more on this see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum .

Buddhism from nearly 2,500 year ago got there first, and goes even further by denying even the “I” (the thinker) that is doing the thinking here.

This relates to another major philosophical problem that Descartes tackled, the  so-called Mind-Body problem.   Philosophers down the ages have wrestled with the traditional dualism recognised by many religious people.   For centuries man has been thought to consist of Body and Soul;  the two are deemed to be fundamentally different:   the first transitory and the second eternal, the first corporeal, physical, and the second, non-corporeal, non- physical.   The mind-body problem revolves around how these two relate to each other.    Buddhism seems to say that ultimately the “my” here is an illusion, created by our mind as another way of making sense of the structure of the world.      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dichotomy  for more detail on this area.   

Discussion of the features of Buddhism lead us on to wonder about the origins of religion generally and in particular to wonder why it was that, in the great expanse of human history, the major religions of the world came into existence within a relatively short  time frame.   Just taking a few examples, Hinduism is regarded as the oldest, and although some elements can be traced back further, as a religion it goes back only a few thousand years.  Buddhism dates from the 6^th century BCE[7].    Judaism (the root of the three Abrahamic religions) goes back to 3,500 BCE.  Christianity dates from the 1^st century CE and Islam from the 7^th century CE.

Reading the book recalled for some members their first interest in Buddhism and the culture of this area.  One member recalled reading as a youngster Cyril Hoskins’ book “The Third Eye” and how it encouraged her to find out more about what was going in Tibet.  It also encouraged her to learn more about other religions and how they contribute to one’s own growth and completion.   One quotation she shared with us resonated with the group, especially after reading Andrew Harvey’s book:

“Eastern thought can be just as rational, liberal, realist, and cynical, as Western; Western thought can be just as mystical, authoritarian, relativist, and obscure as Eastern.[8]‘.

One of the characters in the book made an interesting point about the relationship between East and Western thought.    Charles says

“An absorption in Eastern thought has not meant a negation of the West, but a discovery of the West’s buried and defaced spiritual identity.

“There are differences, he continued, sometimes very radical differences between East and West.   But I know now that there is a dialogue possible between the truths of East and West”.

We discussed the various attitudes demonstrated in the book towards western values and western ideals.   The secular members in the book saw the West in idealised terms, envying and coveting the material advantages of the west.   It was a sad indictment of the consumerism of the west, how consumerism destroys all it touches.

According to the young Drukchen Rinpoche

“Westerners do not believe in being Western as much as Easterners do.  They want the cars and the money and the sex.  But western youth has “suffered being western” and from that suffering they have grown clearer, sadder, more truthful, more “searching”.

He is reflecting a view that the author had encountered earlier, expounded by one of the “young Casanovas with Brylcreamed hair” in Leh market, who dreams of “doing nothing and driving a long red sports car in California”.   But he bemoans his fate:

“I have to spend all the winter getting frozen in Kuklu trying to cheat the villagers there out of bells and bowls and spoons and turquoise necklaces so I can come and cheat the old German ladies here.  No one lives liked this in America do they?”

Little does he know! Western capitalist system is closer to his own life style than he can ever imagine.

However, the Drukchen Rinpoche was optimistic about the growth of Buddhism, especially in the West where he felt there was a hunger for an escape from materialism and consumerism. And yet he counsels Andrew Harvey not to stay in Ladakh:

“Those who reject the materialism of the West, who despite it …. Are in danger of refusing to look at it, they are in danger of not being responsible to the facts of life as it is live and must be lived today.

But so many westerners who find solace in the East are coming to have their Egos healed…. but the East is not a large convalescent room where Westerners can play at being spiritual”.

THE BOOK AS AN ACCOUNT OF ANDREW HARVEY’S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

Some of us found ourselves wondering if the Drukchen Rinpoche’s  observation was deliberately targeted at Andrew Harvey.   Reviews of the book seem fairly divided on the degree to which this book really recalled the author’s spiritual journey.

Certainly for some of us the book recalled the 1970s when it was still fashionable to head East ‘to find oneself’, or at the very least ‘the secret of life’.   Incidentally, this fascinating voyage of discovery often started in the famous Pudding Shop[9] in Istanbul’s Sultan Ahmet district!

A number of us felt Andrew Harvey came across very much as a product of his time, apparently disillusioned by the west and its corrupt values and in search of an ill-defined “something”.

However, the cynics amongst us wondered whether there “something” was more to do with finding material for a book rather than any spiritual enlightenment.   The book was written (against the advice of his agent) a couple of years after the experience and yet the writing goes into very specific detail, for example, making direct quotations from conversations, often at a very abstruse level.   Was he taking careful notes for later use or was he simply blessed with a great memory?

Also we wondered about his ready ability to communicate with everyone he met.   He does say he had “a little Ladakhi” but he is doing instantaneous translation of very difficult concepts from the first day he arrived in Leh.

One member felt that the book read as a work of fiction, noting that despite all his arcane conversations with those he met, the author never really seemed to establish any real relationships with anyone.   Others agreed there was something of the detached “interviewer” about him.

Another felt that he was somehow “attitudinising” – sounding like he imagined a seeker after truth ought to sound whilst not actually being committed to the task.  Several of us wondered how he supported himself whilst he was there, or was he supported by those he met on the way.

Another member couldn’t decide whether some of the (for him) “over the top” purple prose sprang from the poet in Andrew Harvey being unable to express his deepest and most profound feelings in any other way……. or whether it masked a void at the centre of his experiences in Ladakh.

The following passage, for example, sounds good, but what is it actually telling us?

“In the new transparance of my mind, i find that everything – the roar of the river, the bird-call, the harvesters singing – in the same sound, the same ringing sound, only in different registers, different intensities.   Even the rocks are ringing to this sound, even the small stones I can see dully shining at the edge of the water, even the tuft of moss and sheep droppings to my right.   My breath is that sound also, and my heartbeat, and the brush and creak of my body as I stir”.

But the book does have some more down-to-earth insights, such as advice on travelling by bus in that part of the world:

“A lesson that riding on a Ladakhi bus has to teach you is to give in, to surrender.   There is no point in being impatient, gritting your teeth, praying that the bus will go, cursing the driver operatically, wishing you were back in England or America, exchanging bitter conspiratorial asides with fellow Europeans – you just have to give in, to accept everything without hope or reserve.   There is nothing else you can do without going crazy.   And once you have given in, you begin to enjoy it”

Here is a lesson we could all learn perhaps when dealing with officious “jacks-in-office” anywhere.

It was interesting in the new Afterword, which he wrote nearly 20 years after his journey, he mentions how he proudly told the Rinpoche that he had written a book about him – and how the Rinpoche was not at all impressed.   It rather sounded as though the book was more important than the spiritual journey.

It was also interesting in the Afterword that he seemed to be less impressed by what he had experienced nearly 20 years before, giving a mild rebuke to the Dalai Lama for apparently homophobic remarks he claimed he made (Andrew Harvey is gay so this would be particularly significant for him), his apparent endorsement of a nuclear India, and citing scandal and the patriarchal bias of much of Tibetan civilisation and the limitations of their misogyny and elitism.   It all seems a lifetime away from the starry-eyed neophyte and his unforgettable life-changing experiences from 1979..or was it 1981?

As his web page proclaims, a lot has happened to Andrew Harvey since his Ladakh visit.  He seems to have been busy sampling a whole range of religious and mystical phenomena, meeting Indian sages and saints, “collaborating with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying ….. undertaking  a ten-year-long exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism”.

Now the author has become a mystic himself, he is the Founder Director of the Institute of Sacred Activism, following his delivery of  his vision of the contemporary crisis now confronting us in today’s world and its potential solution in what he has termed “Sacred Activism,”.  He sees this as “the culmination of his life’s work”. “This extraordinary occasion (the revelation of his vision of Sacred Activism) was made into a documentary film by the Hartley Film Foundation and is available on DVD.   He also has a spiritual counselling practice in Chicago and is available for spiritual direction via phone”.

Overall, the group enjoyed reading a Journey in Ladakh, especially for what they were able to learn about this part of the world and about Buddhism.