Namaste,
The Bayon from the 12th century at Angkor Wat features 48 faces. All directions.
Immense and powerful.
This slide show also includes images of detailed carvings from the main Angkor temple, depicting "Churning The Sea of Milk," an ancient Sanskrit Hindu story.
Metta.
A metallic Cambodian loudspeaker spoke, Now here this, The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes, Departing for points unknown, A massive short celestial event known as YOUR LIFE will depart in five minutes.
You are advised to assemble all the necessary documents, certified seals of approval, water, invisible guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the Mind-At-Large on your short, fast, easy tour.
Bring your life with you, And a glossy greasy Laughing Planet guidebook with heavily creased pages. If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second you will discover a new sense of perspective.
You may be surprised or traumatized depending on your perception to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing the temples. You will DO Angkor. Get the t-shirt. Check it off your list. Less is more.
Please conclude all private and group discussions, disagreements or arguments with your fellow travelers to ascertain your destination. Talking time is finished.
The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small distant isolated village where he will plant rice and provoke white cows with socialist Marxist production tools to pull the plow through mud.
The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to become a tuk-tuk driver. If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family will starve to death. This is a common problem here. Death by starvation. If you survive you win.
If he dies you will be held in escrow. (Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment)
A tuk-tuk river driver has an easy job. An easy life. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. He makes $15-20 for the day.
The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $2.03.
Not a single woman in Siem Reap is a tuk-tuk driver. There are 3-4 women tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. They are as rare as clean drinking water, sanitation, hospitals and schools. Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guest houses. They are the guest and you are the house.
Your house has many symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious lives breaths-laughs and dances where it reveals inner vision. Clean all your rooms. Take out the garbage. Explore your diverse rooms.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff. You are the housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols and nothing.
A woman doesn't work as a tuk-tuk driver because:
-it's too dangerous
-it's inappropriate
-it's foolish
-they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative
-they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, producing offspring, taking care of kids and the elderly, washing, cleaning, and cooking
-their family will kill them with love and affection
Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. She produced children in assembly line operations with the highest quality control standards known to modern medicine and umbilical chords.
It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. Tisk, tisk, tuk, tuk.
Your mother was appointed to have you.
Greetings,
Once upon a time five tourists from Colorado came to Cambodia for two weeks. 14 daze.
The leader was a dentist from the Rockies. He had been coming here for ten years offering his services in the capital and rural villages. Doing good work, considering the state of dental health care. He also wanted to see his part-time local girlfriend. She ran a dental clinic in the big city.
She was hot. They practiced oral hygiene whenever they could. It was a mutually satisfying orgasm experience with pliable tissue, lots of saliva and swimming body fluids. Drill me baby.
In the group was a female dental hygentist and three dazed and crazed rich high school kids. The woman was in her 50's, lived in a conservative rural mountain town and was new to Asia.
Someone asked her about life in America. "It's a mess. People on welfare have this sense of entitlement. They get cell phones, food stamps and have no incentive to work. The school systems are falling apart. Immigrants from Mexico keep flooding in. Who would have thought that Hispanics would be the majority in Dodge City, Kansas? Immigrants do all the work that other citizens avoid. Plain and simple."
They went to Angkor for a day. They went to health clinics and helped the local staff. They shopped. They left, filled with monumental anxiety about traveling in reverse.
Metta.
Greetings,
Hands of Cambodian children.
"Mister, wanta buy a book? Wanta buy some postcards? Cold water mister? No money for school. Book mister? Good price. You buy..."
Metta.
Greetings,
How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. They feel the experience of 8th century artistic splendor with only their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. It's not about knowing, understanding the people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera.
They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.
They press optical machines against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image, their memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!
Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept. He waited when they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.
Hurry! They have no time to see with their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget.
They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude.
Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press, ever so lightly, the Down Loadswitch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker and play on a screen behind their eyes.
Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.
Metta.
Interior, Banteay Srei, 9th C.
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