Non-fiction DISTANT HORIZONS By Prakash Thapa
DISTANT HORIZONS
By Prakash Thapa
Distant Horizons is
a travel literature for which I have worked around 20 years, exploring the
exotic mountain life, love, silence, Buddhism, trekking and meditative
awareness. It is therefore a blend of travel, anthropology, positivity,
imaginations and freedom.
cing various dimensions of life and the cross cultural artifact. It has given me an immense opportunity to explore life and its beauties in general. I believe that my work is a life positive account of highland journey and the western world, and it inspires people to live positively.
After crossing Thorong Pass 5416 meters with
Sanjay in 2000 A.D., I decided to travel the mountain highlands of Nepal to explore
mountain culture, silence and the wider dimensions of life. Travelling mountain
highlands is a unique experience in particular. According to Maurice Herzog, it is like that of the travelling in fourth
dimension, yet personally, I feel it like a
travelling in silence, discovering the Buddha Nature.
Basically, I find it as a healing experience, a way to realize the
essential truth of life, rural landscapes and the socio-cultural aspects of
life and anthropology.
The mountain trails, villages, Buddhist Monasteries,
chhortens, prayer wheels, the innocent
people of highlands, the music of Buddhist incantations, the silent
reverberation of nature, the soothing music of atmosphere are what I find the amazing
things of beauty while travelling in the highlands of Nepal.
I most often recall the times when Lamas were moving
to the monastery early in the morning, rotating prayer wheels, chanting Om Mani Padme Hum
during my childhood time, for the mantra has made an everlasting imprint in my mind
since then.
I have loved people and their feelings. I have
always put them in the centrality of life because they have been the living force
in the mountains since long, constructing the history of humanity. I have
always loved the smiles of people, their innocence and truth. Like romanticists,
I have also found strength in rustic life because there is beauty of living in
rural landscapes.
Even Swiss thinker Carl Gustav Jung has said that
everything begins from mountains. Moreover, I think it is the quality of
thinking that determines life in actuality. Due to material culture, people are
running after wealth, power and greed and have lost their natural state of
living. Rousseau further says that people are happy when they are
in their original state which he calls the 'state of
nature.'
The first ever story that I read was 'Musafir'
written in Nepali by one of my brothers Mr. Narayan Thapa Magar when I was a
school student. It was a typical love story and we read it several times while
going to the Chepe and the
Marsyangdi River in Thantipokhari Gorkha.
The
Marsyangdi has always been an inspiration for me because of its steady movement
which signifies the flow of life in actuality. I have spent many hours staying
by the bank of the Marsyangdi River, watching
the very ripples of water coming and going by. Also, I spent times with my
friends staying late night playing flute, madal, guitar and sarangi.
This apart,
the beautiful rural landscape around Palungtar Village
and the majestic mountains such as Mt. Manaslu, Bouddha Himal, Mt. Machhapuchhre, the innocent local people and their lives
have also inspired my writing in general.
For, I have been in love with the silent rural
villages, monasteries, prayer wheels, stupas, highland trails, dhupi and salla forests, rivers and the
floating clouds which have made formative influences in my mind since long.
Like the existentialist thinking, I have placed
people in the centrality of my writing because I have deep respect to the people
who are simple and down-to-earth in essence. Similarly, people are still
loving, helpful and innocent in rural areas like what romanticists have said.
I have written the travel accounts of places like Langtang, Lomanthang, Gosaikunda, Everest
Gokyo Lake, Thorong Pass, Annapurna Base Camp, Ghandruk, Ghorepani, Sikles,
Panchase, London, Plymouth, Devon, Kingsbridge and Staffordshire.
Distant Horizons is
therefore an account of life which attempts to observe the beauty of living
life despite problems and suffering. I think everybody has some problems in life;
however he/she has to search the possibilities so
as to transform life into bliss.
I think love, kindness, compassion and understanding
of an impermanent nature of things can help develop the basics of life because
everything is moving, changing and developing, and the nature of things are
uncertain in terms of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
However, science has brought a revolutionary change
in thinking and the development of human civilization since stone-ages to the development
of quantum theories at present. Mankind would have been living in the dark,
superstitious and religious state, if science had not developed the world to
this level.
However, the large majority of people still believe
in superstition. Specially, in the country like Nepal, people are backward in
thinking so that politicians are taking advantages of their ignorance and
illiteracy.
Moreover, I am thankful
to all the writers whose writings and thoughts have made the formative
influences on my writings.
I have read the writers
such as Franz Kafka, Hegel, Sir Issac Newton, David Hume, John Locke, Galileo, Copernicus,
Gregor Mendel, Karl Marx, Engels, Simon de Beauvoir, Albert Einstein, Werner
Heisenberg, Paulo Coelho, Peter Mathieson, Henrik Harrer, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Sigmund Freud, Karl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Maupassant, Orhan Pamuk, Stephen
Covey, Patrick French, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Albert Camus, Sartre,
Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, Nietzsche, T. S Eliot, August Comte, Max
Weber, Jacques Derrida, Rousseau, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maria Montessori, Jon
Krakauer, Maya Angelou, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Khaled Hosseini, Prem
Chand, Gorky, Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Yangzom Brauen, Katheryn S. March,
Kahlil Gibran, Osho, J. Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti, Taslima Nasrin, R. K. Narayan,
Arundhati Roy, Sudha Murty, P.B. Shelley and John Keats.
Nepal is a good country
and its people are laborious as well. However, people do not have good access to
education, health and shelter. According to anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista, the
tendency of blind faith in god and fatalalism of
Nepalese people has been the main hindrance to development. Moreover, the
social evils of religion such as the prevalent caste system, untouchability,
bureaucratic corruption, mafiaism and criminalization in politics and religious
fundamentalism are some of the obstructing components to development.
Nepal is practicing
federalism, and it is gradually helping people bring social changes in the
country. For instance, Nepal is a multi ethnic, multi cultural, multi religious
and a multilingual country. So the concept of religious secularism is positive because a country should not have its own
religion.
So it is ultimately
education and the scientific thinking that can change the future humanity. Personallly,
I believe in one world concept. I do not generally believe in nationalism
because I think nationalism divides humanity. I believe in J. Krishnamurti and Rabindranath Tagor who advocate one world thinking
because a country is nothing more than an illusion to gain a political control
over people.
Similarly, a god is
nothing but an illusion to gain a religious control over people. In fact,
people belong to earth and the universe, not to the narrow confinement of
political boundary which is created by politicians so as to divide and rule
people. So a country is just an artificial political division.
We are human beings,
and we should all live together without resorting to the narrow walls of
thinking.
We should love humanity;
we should love each other and live in compassion.
Because Buddha says that we are potential
Buddhas.
Prakash Thapa
Comments
Post a Comment