when i was in yunnan

I am actually feeling quite hot under the wraps of my blanket. I had woken up to darkness, I had only the faint light of the window visible to me. It was not much visibility because as I turned to put the window behind me, I couldn't see at all what is in front of me. It was as though I am blind and I for a moment thought I had woken up in an alternate universe where I was blind. I sat there frozen for a minute, trying to recall what I had known about this new dark universe of mine. Then it struck me that nothing has changed, I am just dazed from the sudden waking up in complete darkness. I fumbled about for my mp3 player, difficult because there were so many blankets and so much darkness. I found it after a while and used it to iluminate the front of the room. I just felt I needed my phone at that moment. I had a terrible nightmare. But it had ended nicely, with the savior in my dreams telling me that I can be a better healer than he is if only I put my heart to it. He had saved my parents in my dream. Sometimes I wonder about dreams, are they my subconscious reaching out through me in a world where we are clouded with impatience and blessed with the lack of time ? Maybe we have a sixth sense after all, this sense actually prevents our heart from talking directly to us, blur the voice of our subconscious and what is this sense? A sense of inadequacy..a sense of insufficient time to do everything we want... Because we are so busy to do everything we want, we forget in the end what we really want. Sometimes where you dream, the real desires of our heart surface with a tiny but impactful voice or in a hazy, but yet crystal picture. I am curently in the third day of my yunnan trip. It is around 6 am in the morning. Jianxiong and caleb are snoring to a cacophany around me. One has a nasal ,slightly drumming tone to his snoring , the type where your tonsils participates in the sending out of air from your throat.. While the other is like a incessant droning background noise. Just the sound of air flowing out of the nostril. Occasionally one of them chokes and the snoring ceases, but it will usually return with renewed vigour. Enough about the longitudinal assault of soundwaves from the either side of me. It is supposed to be the coldest part of the day, but I can't feel the effects of the low temperature. Instead I am hot and restless. I am sitting in the courtyard of the house.an elderly lady has already woken up and is seeing to te running of the house in her own quiet and eficient manner. She smiles at me and uttered something about sleeping abit more to me, the locals have some thick accent that we are slowly taking time to wade through. I smiled back politely and did my best to become invisible. In hope that she will not attempt any other form of communication while I am writing this.sometimes eye contact is what makes one obvious and loud.
I had a conversation with shawn, our guide for this trip. It was after visiting the temple and joining in the ceremonious beating of the drums with the folks here. They are a real friendly bunch, really good with the big ancient drum of the temple. Even the elder monk, I thought he was realy chubby, came out to show us abit of his skills. We had offered incense to the buddha, many of us knelt and prayed for something close to our heart. The only thing I pray for always is health, the gift of life, something I cannot buy with whatever or how much wealth I have. It is a bit funny how similar these two words are in english.
Jingjing, yuhan and helen appeared out of nowhere.I spent half an hour fraternizing with them. They were supposed to be going to the market to buy the animals and vegetables for breakfast. Apparently they will be cycling to the marketplace.
So shawn was telling me about his Lord jesus, about God and how He lives in each and everyone of us. There is a body of flesh and a spirit in everyone of us at first. But when eve and adam fell for the temptation, the original sin, we got separated and body and spirit became two. Only when jesus came, he led a life of godliness, without sin and eventually sacrificed himself for humanity were we reunited with our soul again. I do believe that each andeveryone of us are connected, maybe by a common spirit, a spirit that lives in everything ever created. Afterall aint we really similar down to the most basic levels, at the scale of the atomic and subatomic? God created the world because the world is so beautiful and marvelous and intricate. And god was just there forever and ever. How about this? God is not separate from us, each and everyone of us, plus the other living and non living things make up god. Precisely because everything in this world is so marvelous and beautiful. And everything has just existed since time immemorial. Why is there a need for a separate entity? Sometimes when certain aspects of religion caters nicely for human concerns, it seems only too perfect that it can only be man made.not the religion itself but that solutions that they offer. A logical and apt solution or even right solution doesn,t make it true. Almost all religion offers hope after death, while they may claim that human are so insignificant, they do not think that death and the eventual nothingness and emptiness is a suitable end to our insignificant existence. They offer hope and precisely that is what mankind needs. To know that we really matter. The best leaders know how to serve up these hopes to their followers, the best businessmen know how to play the right tune of hope and cheeriness. It is a human trait to proffer hope. And maybe also a human trait to be skeptical of hopes as well.