This afternoon I retrieved my van from the bodywork mechanic who had been fixing it. A few days previous, on my way back from Qoyllur Rit’i, a drunk driver backed his large truck into the front of the van. He neglected to look in his rearview mirror before backing up - even the police agreed with this matter, and the windshield and right front of my van were smashed and shattered. The local station chief, who had recently been a tourist assistance police in a big Peruvian city, clearly explained that I would save myself a lot of hassle by settling "without the authorities." He suggested that I simply accept some money from the truck driver and leave it at that. The chief seemed honest (Peruvian police are often said to be the worst thieves in the country) and I trusted him. Two hours passed in his office. We drank a bit of coffee. The drunk driver sobered up. A soccer match was showing on the tube in the chief’s office and the game was a bigger deal than my busted up van. Everybody was nice and friendly. And things moved real slow.

What a wonderful opportunity it was to play and observe! Simultaneously, I was doing two things. I was directly engaged as a participant in the activity of the situation and, at the same time, I was (somewhat) dispassionately observing the situation as a fascinating mini-drama depicting the difficulties of transcultural communication. Classic vipassana meditation methodology in a daily-life situation.

Certainly, the whole process would have transpired much quicker and more efficiently in the northern part of the western hemisphere or the western as opposed to eastern part of Europe. I am not saying here that I like one system more than the other. I rather like them both (in moderation, of course). What I am commenting on is my enjoyment of the different ways of handling assorted bureaucratic things that you find around the world. The Nigerians and the Japanese, the Swiss and the Mexicans, the Chinese and the Australians all handle things very, very differently. If you’re hooked on efficiency and logic, you will definitely have problems with the South American way of doing things.

The driver was clearly at total fault and by Peruvian law he was required to pay for the full cost of repairs. But he was a poor man and had little money. Also, being only an employee of a company, he might lose his job if the accident was reported to his employers. I estimated the repairs would cost around 400 Soles (the local currency) but the driver had only 100 soles with him at the time. I took that. Then the repairs actually cost near 500 and I had no choice but to pay the remaining repair fees myself.

When I got the van back, some words that had been painted on the front of the van were no longer there. They had been painted over in white (part of the fix-up job of the damaged front) and could no longer be read. The words had said, Vaya con Dios, this meaning ‘Go with God’. Seeing the words no longer there started me thinking once again about the recently popular "new age" concept of you create your own reality. I wondered how true this concept really is. Following is an example of the attempted practice of this concept and the eventual outcome.

In a very conscious and purposeful way, myself and a number of friends (all smart, mature, spiritual people) had put high intentions, good thoughts, and psychic fields of protection around all the phases and facets of my Latin American pilgrimage. This endowing, or intending, took numerous forms, based on the personalities of the friends involved. There were prayers and ceremonies at Native American sweat lodges. There were hundreds of emails and letters of encouragement and safety, blessing the journey and its purpose. There were the 17 paintings and symbols placed on the sides of the van, each painting representing a particular archetype that would, I hoped, cancel any violence a person might do to the van, such as robbery or vandalism. All these assitances given to me to wish and pray for safety and ease in my long vision quest from Mexico to Chile.

And how then, have things transpired? These past nine months have been a time of frequent difficulty and strain for me. Four robberies, two accidents, a rough case of dysentery, and a strange tropical ear infection. Let’s consider these occurrences from the new-age point of view. Did I create all these realities (and the hundreds of mini-realities that went into making each of the larger events)?

Or rather, did reality randomly manifest itself and then, in response to it, I had the opportunity to choose some of my reactions? Let me state it simply here. I am a very strong disbeliever in the new age notion that we create our own reality. To me, the idea is just shallow thinking. The way I explain the occurrence of certain types of unpleasant and unexpected situations in life is that they are random manifestations of the random coming together of a thousand little things. As the popular American bumpersticker says, Shit Happens. (And I do not think that my disbelief in anyway lessens the lessons I receive from the experiences of my daily living!)

Here is another interesting example to consider. Let’s say four hundred people all die at the same time in a big air plane crash. Have they all together created this reality? To do so would mean a very big operation in communication between all these negative-reality creating people. First of all, it would mean that all these souls (whatever that is) had to somehow communicate together sometime before the crash in order to arrange the crash. A day had to be decided on and an airline chosen so that all the souls’ bodies could purchase the necessary tickets. Next, these members of the negative-reality team would also have to have gotten the agreement of the souls of all the people who would be affected by the 400 deaths (relatives, friends, co-workers of the soon to be dead people). We can’t just go creating some unpleasant reality for all these other people without their permission! And the soon-to-die passengers would also have had to find 10 - 12 other souls (in bodies) that knew how to fly the jet and be its flight crew. But then, we wonder, were these airline employees part of the negative-reality team or were they trying to create some other reality? And if they weren’t part of the death-reality team, then what are the heavenly mechanics that explain out how a large group of people creating one reality can over-ride a smaller group of people creating another reality?

You see, if you look into the matter this way (and don’t just blindly accept the idea as a new-age article of faith), you see that the concept, especially if it is expressed as an absolute, is really quite absurd. It is a truism that is not always true. Yes, sometimes we have a bit of influence on what happens in our lives, but more often, we do not. We only respond.

There are billions of people on the earth doing trillions of things which interact in zillions of ever changing ways. It is a VERY BIG SHOW. There are indeed patterns and structures in this grand canvas of planetary happening but they are localized in discrete space and time portions of the bigger picture. And this bigger picture - certainly in regards to the vast possibility of human behavior and experience - is random. Little kids come by and use rocks to scratch over the lovely paintings on my van; corrupt border officials try to get bribe money out of me; and hungry, poorly educated, petty thieves steal things from me in the night. I did not create the countless mini-realities that gave rise to these sort of situations (the negative childhood experiences of the robbers, for example) but I do have a lot of choice in how I respond to what comes my way.

When you begin to understand that this is what is really going on, that we can consciously create our responses to the greater reality manifesting all around us, then life becomes much easier, less stressful, and a lot more fun. Good stuff still happens and bad stuff too. But the relevant issue is dealing with what you can deal with (the part of the world that you can control, which is you, not the rest of the world and other people, which you can not control).This means purposely observing how you react and respond to the arrival of all situations in your life. Good or bad. Watch it all. This has been the primary focus of the past nine months of my pilgrimage. I purposely and frequently endeavor to watch and reflect upon those moments of reaction and response in my daily living. Catching myself just in the instant of reaction is what I am trying to do.

But there is a little problem with this type of meditation. It’s only possible to practice it in the presence of some form of reaction-causing situation. The situation must get heated up with enough voltage so as to provoke you to react with a higher-than-normal intensity. Then there is really something to watch. However, the greater the intensity of your reaction, the harder it is to keep your cool as a dispassionate observer and the easier it is to lose yourself in the heat of the moment. I still do that a lot.

Considering this equation of greater intensity of situation equals greater chance of mastering inappropriate personal reactions, brings me once more to a criticism of another popular new-age concept, that of "following the path of least resistance." As I have written elsewhere, the main argument I have with this concept is that following the path of least resistance sometimes means that we avoid things that need to be looked at and that we perpetuate weaknesses and problems. Certainly it’s smart to sometimes get out of the way of coming trouble, yet to make a behavioral ideology of doing so is to invite weakness, continuing ignorance, and complication of crisis. In some cases, I am going to run full speed in the direction of greatest resistance. By learning to handle the problem, rather than running away from it, I gain a strength otherwise unavailable.

All of this leads me to restate that the primary intention I have for the pilgrimage I am on in Latin America is the flowering of deeper wisdom and love in my being. This is the reality that I am seeking to create, whether it comes from difficulty or ease. Correspondingly, I am trying to look upon all the things that happen in my daily living as opportunities to support a higher attainment of spiritual being. It is perhaps ironical then, but I must actually thank the thieves and corrupt police and other mean hearted people I have encountered in my travels. For they have been essential to some of the finest lessons and teachings I have recently received. In the crucible of crisis, wisdom has grown strong.