In Search of Paradise – Firstpost

by


Pico Iyer
is known for writing books that transport you to places across the world but also bring you home to yourself. This British-born writer of Indian heritage who lives between the United States and Japan is out with his new book called The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise published by Penguin. In this in-depth and heartfelt interview, he answers questions about the making of this book, the inner journeys that accompanied the outer ones, his close association with the Dalai Lama, and more.

1. Why did you choose to call this book The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise?

Really because it is everything we don’t know that ultimate defines our lives: love, faith, terror, wonder. All lie far beyond our grasp and our explanations, and yet they’re the forces that turn us around and make our existences what they are.

At the simplest level, in the Age of Information, I sometimes worry that we know less than ever before, and least of all about the countries we hear most about, be they Cuba or Syria or Iran or North Korea. But beyond that, I fear that we are living at a time of great dividedness in which it’s tempting to hide behind the illusion of knowledge to protect ourselves from uncertainty.

More and more people—in India, the United States, everywhere—are more or less saying, “I know more or better than you.” Even as viruses and forest fires and hurricanes are reminding us every hour that most of us don’t have a clue. So I wanted to write a book about all that we don’t know, for better and worse, and how we can begin to fashion a durable sense of Paradise in a world of constant uncertainty.

You write about how it seems much easier to imagine paradise in the past or the future than in the present moment. What might be the reason(s) behind this distance we create?

It’s so easy to fashion a paradise inside our heads (our hearts, or our imaginations). But the real challenge is to find one in the world. And even when we do find one in the world, that often is a function of illusion or projection: a visitor can sit on a houseboat in Kashmir, as I describe, and find himself in an idyllic scene of kingfishers and lotus ponds and silence. But that can be paradise for him only if he ignores the violent and difficult reality ten minutes across the water, in the city, where reality has little time for a tourist’s notion of paradise.

And in one of the other Indian destinations I describe in this book, Ladakh, a traveller may come upon a beautiful, relatively unspoiled and calm place and call it Shangri-La, only to be reminded by the locals that the Shangri-La that they seek is that modern, prosperous and cutting-edge place known as California.

Besides, if Ladakh is truly an unspoiled place, what does a traveller have to bring to it? Very possibly, only corruption, or change (which may not be for the better)? As a tourist in an Edenic-seeming location, I have to wonder if I’m the serpent in the garden. That’s the reason I have His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the centre of this book and appearing in so many places. Having been in discussion with him since 1974, I’ve come to feel he’s one of the great realists of our planet. As leader of his people for 82 years, he’s never been in a position to traffic in romantic or wishful notions; he knows that the only better world—or self—we can fashion has to be here and now.

You take the reader along on journeys to Mashhad, Varanasi, Kandy, Belfast, Srinagar, Broome, Jerusalem, Koyasan, Ladakh and so many other places. Based on your observations and interactions with people, what makes pilgrimage so important to people across religious traditions? What need does it fulfill?

I think all of us long, at some level, to be reminded of something larger, truer or most lasting than ourselves. And a pilgrim is travelling in part to be joined with all the pilgrims who have walked the same path over centuries, whether in the direction of Lhasa or Varanasi or Santiago de Compostela. A pilgrim is walking also in the direction of community, joined with everyone else who is walking along the same path. And walking, perhaps, in search of a simpler and truer self that gets forgotten in the rush of the everyday; he or she wishes to be brought back to a deeper self that too often gets misplaced.

As you saw, I’m not really travelling as a pilgrim in this book, but rather as an observer. And one essential point of the book is that a place such as Jerusalem can be deeply moving and magnetic even to a visitor like myself, who’s neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jew. Again, I’m searching in this book for whatever can reach beyond the divisions that are tearing up so many of our societies—and our planet—today. Which is why the central figures in the book are Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who found his final realisation in front of some Buddhas in Sri Lanka; the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk who delivers talks on the Christian Gospels, with tears in his eyes; Eido-roshi, a Zen teacher who draws his instruction from the Christ story; and the Sufis—Hafez, say—who choose to look beyond all man-made divisions.

An exemplary pilgrim might be the one who can find enlightenment everywhere.

The book opens with this sentence: “Four hours in Iran, and already I was having to rethink almost everything.” What impressions of Iran had you carried with yourself? What were these ideas and assumptions based on?

As you read, I had been studying Iran for decades before I arrived. I had written a very long article on Iran for my editors at Time magazine, drawing on reports from both an Iranian colleague and an American who travelled around Revolutionary Iran. I had financed my first book, back in 1986, with a 6000-word article on Iranian history for the Smithsonian magazine. I had later devoted four full years of my life to reading and researching everything I could find on Islam and Iran in order to publish a 354-page novel – Abandon – partly set there, even though I’d never been myself.

I had also travelled fairly widely across the Middle East, from Syria to Lebanon to Oman to Yemen to Turkey and Jerusalem before arriving in Iran.

So I thought I was well-prepared. But within four hours, as that first sentence discloses, I had learned more than from four years of intensive research. Which for me, apart from being a humbling truth, was a reminder of how important it is to experience the world in the flesh. These days it’s so easy to assume one knows a place—be it India or the U.S. or Afghanistan—from seeing it on our TV screens, watching ten videos on YouTube, reading a thousand accounts in our newspapers. I’m pretty convinced we can’t know much at all from a distance, and that in fact the illusion of knowledge blinds us at least as much as simple ignorance might.

I wanted to start my book with that assumption: thirty years of absorbing Iran from afar, and I knew less than nothing.

Later in the book, you write, “Recognising how much lay beyond my knowledge was what made space for growth and surprise, and left me usefully in place.” Do you always respond to not-knowing with humility, or does this response set in only after the anger and frustration that incomprehension can lead to?

I’m not sure I can lay claim to much humility, but I do think coming into contact with incomprehension is the point of travelling. When I’m sitting at home, I can tell myself I “know” a lot about Iran or North Korea or Kashmir; the beauty of going to any one of them is being stripped of that simplistic assumption. And when I’m sitting at home, I may pontificate on “universal values” and “human reality.” But not a word I say begins to apply to the world as North Koreans know it.

In the age of globalism, I think it’s easier than ever to be provincial: to surround ourselves with people who think as we do, feel as we do and look as we do. So I’m grateful to encounter the world first-hand and have my complacency exploded.

I can’t say I always delight in humility, but I can say that one good reason to see the world is to be humbled—and surprised and filled with wonder.

While describing your experiences in Kashmir, you note that the weather was “as notoriously hard to anticipate as its politics”. How do you remind yourself to practice what you call “surrender” (in the spiritual sense of the term) in circumstances when physical and emotional safety become major concerns?

Safety for me is one of the many things that are impossible to control or anticipate and that remind me of how little I know. When the pandemic broke out, I was in Antarctica, on a cruise-ship, as pampered and comfortable a place as I can imagine. But when 41 people straight from the People’s Republic boarded it, I was closer to the coronavirus in its early stages than anyone I knew. When I travelled to Iran, on an American passport, some of my neighbours in California worried for me; those who had been to the country advised me, correctly, that the main thing to fear would be that everyone would want to be my friend and would want to invite me, as an American, to dinner.

I take all the sensible precautions I can think of and am in no hurry to court danger. But I don’t want to barricade myself within a simple understanding of what safety is. When I began my travelling life, in the 1980s, I was in many war-zones and places of turbulence—from Nicaragua and El Salvador to the Philippines and Cuba. Nothing bad ever happened to me there. Then I returned to my parents’ home in Santa Barbara, California—one of the most privileged, affluent and protected places on earth—and that home burned down in a forest fire, with me right next to it (surrounded on all sides by flames the height of a five-story building).

I think the virus reminded us that someone in New York City can be as much at risk of infection as someone in Srinagar, and that many of our notions of which places are safe, and which dangerous, are illusions. That’s why I want to remind myself that I really don’t know so much.

You quote a tour guide at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem saying, “It’s not the place but the people who come here give it truth.” How does this speak to your experience of visiting sacred sites across the world? When have you felt a sense of belonging, and when have you felt or been made to feel an outsider?

That’s a great question. I think it’s somewhat arbitrary: with places as with people, someone will extend herself to you, for no good reason, and someone else will bar her door to you for no good reason. I do think that places such as Jerusalem or Varanasi are so charismatic that it’s hard to come away from them unaffected; there’s an intensity and a concentration of energy there so strong that almost anyone, regardless of her tradition, will be shaken, and may not even be able to tell how much the effect is a good one or a disturbing one.

During the years when I was visiting Jerusalem, the great Islamic mosques were closed to visitors, which was a disappointment; but elsewhere, everywhere from Damascus to Istanbul, I have found mosques to be very welcoming. One blessing of the modern moment is that so many of us are exposed to so many traditions and have the opportunity to be instructed, or moved, by any one of them.

For me the most important sentence I encountered in Jerusalem was the sign outside the Basilica of the Agony: “PLEASE: No Explanations Inside the Church.”

Thomas Merton and Henry David Thoreau are significant presences in this book. How would you describe your relationship with them? What does their writing offer you?

Thank you. Both have been very close companions to me for thirty years now because they offer wisdom, clarity and, most of all, a radical, counter-cultural sense of how to live. Both of them felt that a career in the world, material goods and fame would offer them much less than obscurity, inner wealth and a sense of obedience (in one case to his Catholic community, in the other to the laws of nature).

I love the fact that Merton was always questioning—himself, his faith, everything he held sacred; in many ways, he was a patron saint of restlessness who nonetheless knew that the only thing worth living for was something essential. The substance of silence offers us far more than the answer to any question, he observed, which is something that Thoreau would have understood very deeply.

And Thoreau reminded me, when I was very young, that it would be folly to wake up at seventy, close to death, and realise that I had never lived. That I had simply, unquestioningly followed someone else’s idea of what is useful and valuable.

Perhaps what I most love about both is that they came to much of their wisdom by going nowhere. Thoreau found the entire universe in his little cabin in the woods, and asked why we would go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar; Merton asked how we could talk about going to the moon when we hadn’t crossed the abyss in ourselves.

Both of them asked what the real point of travel was. And both felt that the only value of their lives came in what they could bring out from their solitude into community and the world. The topic of Thoreau’s first lecture in Concord wasn’t solitude; it was “Society.”

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You mention that you’ve accompanied the 14th Dalai Lama on 10 trips to Japan. This is a rare privilege. When you are with him, do you see him as your father’s friend, a Buddhist monk, or the earthly manifestation of Avalokiteshvara? Do you try to separate the man from the myth? Does it seem necessary?

One of the Dalai Lama’s great gifts is to make all such precautions unnecessary by reminding us at every moment that he’s a regular human being, subject to the same sorrows, difficulties and temptations as any one of us. Whomever he meets, he regards as an equal—someone who can teach him something—and when people ask him to be their teacher, he customarily says that he would much rather be regarded as “a spiritual friend.”

As someone who’s been so much in the public eye for more than eighty years, he’s always been a target for projection, myth-making, romancing. But he knows just how to cut through that by speaking to (and from) the heart and presenting himself as everyone’s closest, if long-unmet, friend.

So when I travel with him, I’m always aware that he’s that man across the lunch-table every day—warm, humble, full of good humour but with remarkably precise and clear answers to any deep question one might ask. When I accompany him on shopping expeditions in a Yokohama shopping-mall, I’m reminded that he needs to buy new pairs of spectacles, as many of us do. When I asked him about the saddest moment in his life, he looked out the window, remembered his bodyguards turning around to travel back into tumultuous Tibet after safely delivering him to India in 1959, and his eyes misted up with the memory.

I do feel that the many myths that might congregate around him do him a disservice; the heart of the Buddha’s teaching was that he was a regular mortal who was simply choosing to do what any of us could do, regardless of our religion or our circumstances. And as a physician of the mind, which is how I see His Holiness, he is, like any doctor, fallible, mortal and not able to deal with every last affliction even as he is devoting his life to trying to ease suffering. One of his most engaging and frequent answers to public questions—especially about marriage, say, or raising children—is “I don’t know.”

I will say that for anyone who travels, it’s a rare privilege to be with His Holiness as he travels the world, as I’ve had the chance to be everywhere from Jaipur to Zurich to New Jersey to Okinawa. Partly because he always travels as a student; always wants to listen as much as to speak; and, as mentioned above, is a lifelong realist who doesn’t believe that suffering will ever be solved easily or soon.

I remember meeting him the day after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, more than thirty years ago, and being so moved by the fact that he didn’t think his problems were over and told me it altered little in his simple determination to try to help one life at a time.

You mention a Benedictine monastery in California, which seems like a sanctuary from the rest of the world, and also a place to journey within after you’ve been on the road for a while. Does the need for exploration conflict with the need for stillness, or do they make space for each other without any collision?

I think everyone maintains some version of this balance in her or his life: we all go out into the world to do our jobs, to take care of shopping, to pay taxes and meet friends and then we all come back and try to process, within the quiet of our homes, everything we’ve thought and felt. We all need to learn about the world, to encounter people very different from us, to accumulate experiences and impressions and we all need to sit still to convert experience into meaning and to try to distill what we’ve seen into such insights as we can usefully take away from the sights.

So I don’t think there’s a conflict any more than there’s a conflict between breathing in and breathing out; each only deepens and amplifies the other. Like most people, I sometimes feel that I’m taking in more than I can understand; that means I need to try to sit still for a long time so the ratio of the external to the internal doesn’t get thrown off. Other times, I sense I’m too quiet and removed from the world and then I take myself out into the world, often either to one of the poorest nations (from Haiti to Cambodia) or to a war-zone (like the many described in this book).

The important thing is not to neglect either and not to mistake one for the other. As I wrote once in the context of the Dalai Lama, when problems arise with our car, it achieves nothing to repaint it; we have to open the hood and get to work on the engine. So too in our lives: changing location achieves nothing unless we look under the hood.

Meister Eckhart pointed out, centuries ago, “So long as the inner work is strong, the outer work will never be puny.” That time alone, building up an inner savings account, is the only thing that’s going to help us when a virus forces us to stay at home for months on end or a loved one is on her deathbed or a forest fire reduces everything one has ever owned to ash. I try to remind myself of this as the world seems ever more to try to get us to live externally and to respond to external prompts.

But I’m really happy you ask this because as it happens I’ve already delivered a draft of my next book, about my 31 years with a community of Benedictine monks, to my long-suffering editor in New York. I’m counting on that to be the companion-piece to The Half-Known Life, a reminder that the only paradise we can find has to be in the middle of real life and in the face of our own mortality.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance journalist, writer and educator who tweets @chintanwriting

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