monks in high mountains
We whirled by and I almost missed him. I had seen him two weeks earlier in some other valley on some other stretch of road, just barely on the pavement. The drive from Paro to Thimpu used to take 2.5 hours. It was down a valley to a confluence and then up the other waterway, one valley to another with water as the lead. When I first came to Bhutan, it was a small paved road where you had to stop to let cars pass safely on one side. This time though it was a 45 minute drive on a large 2 lane road lined the whole way with colored flags, blue, yellow, red, white. As we drove I saw three different people along the way in addition to him, all in an act called a prostration pilgrimage. The pilgrim will start a journey, miles from the destination, by saying a prayer, then bowing and stretching their body flat on the ground towards a holy Buddhist site, such as a sacred Tibetan monastery, temple, mountain, or lake, then repeat the process which allows for travel by the speed of the body length. The destination will be reached only by connecting the laying distance from home to temple. This can take months or years and is seen across the Himalaya region. It is an act of profound belief. This pilgrim I had seen three valleys over in central Bhutan a few weeks earlier and was told he had started three months prior from far eastern Bhutan, a long driveway to get home.
The flags and pilgrims all were for the same cause, a murmur and a dream that had started in whispers of soothsayers, Kings, and lamas a few years prior, that there was going to be a need for a gathering, going for scale; for a gathering the likes of which Bhutan has never seen, at least in recorded history. But it would be folly to limit it to Bhutan, it was a gathering for Himalaya and the Buddhist world. No, more than that, as there were planes and travelers from further, it was a gathering for hope and prayer all in the name of peace on earth, which is something to aspire to. The Global Peace Prayer Festival was born into existence, planned, and put into place, and over 100,000 people came together on the side of the Himalayas to participate. I was there, by coincidence, and it was wonderful.
I heard the idea came from monks in high monasteries predicting that 2024 and 2025 would be exceptionally heavy years for humanity, and we would need to balance the globe with an outpour of hope.
Words have power, and I mean that literally. “By the powers vested in me,” we say, in some modern magic act of speech to law, “I now pronounce”; A judge hammers a mallet onto a desk and in the smack of wood on wood it makes it so. The instance of legal becoming in the saying out loud. I think there are times where we think we are so modern that incantations are behind us, but if you look just loosely you can see we still hold on to this particular magic because speaking it can bring it to fruition. A conjuring through spells and prayers. Speech act theory talks of what’s called illocutionary or performative utterance, or that which changes the world by being spoken. In contrast to descriptive mode, which is, “It is raining.” This does not cause the rain to fall, it merely describes the fact of the rain. But illocutionary utterance provides existence through the act of saying, in the saying it becomes. A compelling idea of the powers we forget in language and thought.
And here, in Bhutan, books are houses of incantations, sacred objects wrapped in silks and praised higher than statues or images. They are more than just written matter, they possess properties that extent beyond their strict meaning. The act of putting an idea down into jaggy forms on paper and have a mind be able to use those forms later to reform those ideas is, in a miraculously forgotten way, magic.
In quantum physics, our mere consciousness has an effect on the physical, allowing particles to go from wave to point based on thought and observation. Very small things like photons (light) and atoms have very strange qualities, they can act like a particle (think very small pebble) and they can also act like a wave (think about the top of a pool). The way it manifests depends, in a way, on if it is observed. If we see it, it changes, if we don’t it doesn’t. The building blocks of matter change if we are conscious of them.
Another strange quality of quantum physics is that very small things like photons and electrons can be in two places at once, electrons can exist, sometimes in large distances, in two places at the same time as far as we can understand. This is called entanglement, and is defined as “a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space.” Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” which it is, it is spooky and strange. Duality in space and time, waves and particles that change when consciousness is involved, all point to a central idea of Quantum thinking, the idea of the interconnectedness of all things, which brings us back to Bhutan and the global peace prayer.
There is a simple something both immensely powerful and fragilely beautiful in gathering in the name of sending out peaceful prayer to the ether. This, of course isn’t a new idea, we gather to express hope and peace often, we just usually have some sort of excuse as to the cause; music, or sport, old pagan ritual. We gather together to sing, to watch a team play a game, but we really gather to be together and to utter our existence into the universe. We inject this idea into holidays and rituals, we gather to celebrate thanks, to celebrate a birth and life and joy, but I feel like we sometimes forget the goal. I, at least, get caught up in the commercialization of these gatherings, the buying and cooking and consuming part, that by the end of it there is sometimes little room for the outward expression of thanks.
The gathering in Bhutan I witnessed last month was different, singular in my lived experience, it held tight to the simple goal of vocalizing peacefulness and love. Pilgrims literally crawled there in ritualistic expressions of importance and reverence. You could feel the vibrations in the air, or perhaps it was the altitude. A lightness, a collective joy and hope and need. It was, and is, beautiful. As in full of beauty, composed of nothing other than needful human beauty, a hope for peace. It was a thanksgiving.
