The Purple Thread of Epictetus- One Year On

Just over a year ago I decided I was going to try and write a book. The topic would be the application of some ancient philosophy, that in my mind was grounded in solid logic, to modern life and knowledge. At the books center would really be a new version of Greco-Roman Stoicism in concept but taken without its unfounded pronouncements about the heavens or the logos. In doing some research for the book I started to see a striking similarity between the aspects of Stoicism I wanted to carry forward and the core philosophy of Buddhism. Both philosophies, in my mind, suffer from undue cultural and religious trappings, so what I wanted to put together was something that drew from the strongest elements of both, where they were correct in their overlap and produce a modern guide to living. This is something I have almost felt a need to do my entire life, and if I accomplish nothing else aside from laying this all out I'll die a happy man.

The purpose of this post though is not so much to go on about this book, but to talk about what I've learned in writing it over the last year. The first of which is that writing is actually hard work. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it quite a bit, but getting yourself to really take it seriously,to focus on every word, to sit down and pound out at least a few pages every day despite what else is going on around you is tough.There have been times when I have been really good about sitting down every day and really concentrating on my work and there have also been months where I didn't keep a single word that I put to electronic paper. For the first few months I set aside a 4 hour span in the morning that was only for writing and it worked well, and after only three or so months I had pounded out a first draft, and I was ready to declare that this whole writing thing wasn't all that hard.

Daniel Denett on Free Will & Determinism

Of all modern philosophers Daniel Dennett may be my favorite. He has repeatedly written on topics that are, in my opinion, some of the most relevant to understanding the human condition. His books Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves and Elbow Room are among some of my top rated and influential books I have read in my life. His insights are very keen and he does an excellent job of getting past the holdovers of the old ways of looking at things while keeping central themes relevant. His familiarness with evolutionary biology and pragmatic approach to really answering questions sets him apart from many other philosophers. Below is a lecture he gave at Edinburgh University concerning free will and determinism and he rightly shows that these are in fact two separate concepts.



Something else I find fascinating here is the use of the key texts that made morals relevant to Stoic philosophers like Epictetus. The crux is in the pursuit of what we have determined as a good based on imperfect knowledge the will to get and avoid that which we deem as fitting into such categories. What I admire so much about Dennett is that while he takes the arguments of those who propose some unlikely philosophical situation seriously (Laplace's Demon), he never the less bases his own answer in remembering what we face in reality. He formulates his answer not in hypotheticals, but instead in the way things are. He points out that it is an important fact that we, as agents, do not have perfect knowledge and that our clear understanding of good and bad decisions is based on our proficiency in considering what information we have and using that to attain or avoid that which we are confronted with.

With this all said I need to get back to writing about moral agency.

Return to Kathmandu- Losing all Focus

So I'm finally back in Kathmandu after a short tour of Cambodia and Thailand. Before I get to the topic of this post I have to give some serious praise to Thai Airways. I've flown them before and they must be one of the best run and most customer friendly airlines I have ever used. While normally US based companies have superior service than overseas competitors, I find our airlines are terrible. Thai airlines have always been very helpful, and their planes are clean, the food isn't bad and their in flight entertainment isn't bad at all. They also don't charge extra for drinks on the planes like some outfits do now. My flight back was with Thai airways to Dhaka in Bangladesh, and then I had a connecting flight through the local carrier to KTM. When I checked in the woman at the counter upgraded me to a direct flight, and it was a flight that departed earlier getting me home three hours early and on a much better plane. So big thanks to them, and I can't recommend them highly enough.

Sometimes it's strange how your perspective of things can change so much in a short time. Before I left for this trip, I'll be honest I wasn't really all that excited about it. Sure I was happy I would finally get to go see Angkor Wat and I was looking forward to being at the ocean again, but mostly I saw it as cutting into a really good rhythm I had gotten myself into that had me writing some of the best stuff I had put together in my life and a running schedule that had put me in some of the best shape of my adult life. Then there was that sync I had finally found with the flow of life in Nepal, picking up supplies, making meals, everything had kind of found its place, so the idea of getting out of that gave me a bit of worry that I might lose a bit of it by the time I returned. This was a well placed concern.

Stepping back into Nepal the other day I couldn't help but feel a bit confused as to what I was actually doing here.  I got home and after unpacking a bit and taking a quick nap I got a chance to Skype Kim back in the states and chat a bit. She asked me, "So what did you miss about Kathmandu?" I was stumped.  kind of stared at her over the screen for a minute while my brain frantically searched for an answer, I stuttered a bit. "I missed running out to Boudha. It will be good to make some more salsa and see people at the market. In the evening before sunset I missed being able to look out at the Himalaya on the horizon. Once it warms up a bit it will be nice to get back out into the mountains, I really do enjoy it out there." But the answers all felt at least a little bit empty.

To be honest what I hadn't missed was the load shedding, the lack of warm water or water at all. I hadn't missed the dark cold nights, the polluted rivers and trash strewn roads. I hadn't missed the dust that covers everything here. I hadn't missed the honking, or the terrible driving habits, or the lack of any shared sense of what common courtesy is. Even though Thailand and Cambodia are extremely different from where I am from, Nepal is another whole dimension.   I hadn't missed the unreliable access to goods, especially certain food, and I hadn't missed the constant hassle that is dealing with everything that is life in Nepal. Coming back home to Nepal, I had completely forgotten why I was here.

I'm now sitting in Imago Dei since my internet isn't working at the house and trying to gain a little focus back. Over the last year I've had a chance to read some of the best, and most important books, I've ever read. Without a doubt I've written the best stuff I've ever written. I've had a  chance to travel to some of the most amazing places I've ever been, and I've interacted with people who I'll never forget. When you look to see where you are geographically and ask why you're there the answer may not always be one of social or practical efficiency. When I really sat and thought about why I was here now, it was mostly because time is cheap and can be purchased at a fraction of the price you get it for in the west. what I missed most about not being in Nepal is the slow rate of wealth depreciation over time, which allows for a stronger focus on the things that you really want to concentrate on and devote energy toward.

I had been so focused before I left that all of the impediments to life that Nepal brings to the fore had melted away as a small cost for what it was allowing me to concentrate on. Now having lost that rhythm, having lost that strong focus the reality of where you are sitting stares you in the face, and without a little mental concentration and a focus on perceptions it's easy to become frustrated with my surroundings. Strangely coming back to Kathmandu I feel further away from it than I have in almost all of my time here. Maybe it's a passing disorientation from my recent trip, maybe it's something more, only time will tell. For now I'm back in Kathmandu, and it's been an awkward homecoming.

A Question Worth Asking

While spending time on the beach in Thailand, I'm trying desperately to get some writing in and not waste all my time here. If nothing else some time on the beach and in the ocean gives a little time to think. Increasingly I have become convinced that volition and human action should not only be the focus, but are almost the only question worth asking in philosophy, possibly aside from some more minor ones having to do with epistemology and logic. What follows is a new addition on the role of philosophy.

There has been a fear that philosophy may never get so far as to state a problem that is capable of being answered, one that is a genuine and capable of being tackled. Philosophy has, in its modern form, seemed to flounder, with its reliance on top down structural cohesion by a supreme law giver torn away under the most trivial scrutiny the void of nihilism and relativism that greeted it seemed to loom like an insurmountable storm. Yet on closer inspection the threat of nihilism seems to me to be more like a hangover caused by the continuation of thinking in an outdated patterns and asking questions that are no longer relevant. We make the mistake of acting like there should still be supreme answers, ultimate realities and absolutes hidden somewhere underneath all that we observe, we have it seems never come to terms with accepting a system that might be more open ended and we have had trouble accepting that we ourselves may be the final arbiters of the value of what we encounter. In the realms of physics, cosmology and the other sciences, the philosopher, has been relegated to the sidelines, occasionally offering helpful, and possibly almost as often unhelpful, commentary on the advances of human knowledge brought about through the research of the scientific community.

So as modern philosophy stumbles into the 21^st century it has all but rendered itself a sideshow offering it seems very little in human understanding. From one fad to the next we have meandered through a sea of ill defined isms, content with deconstructing all of our questions to meaningless quibbles. Yet, despite the final say of what seems to be the recurring voice of 20^th century mantras of relativism and nihilism there seems to be within them a failing, an ignoring of the real question of what philosophy needs to answer. In all of the theory and proclamations, philosophy forgot to consider that we are all still here in the real world, and despite all that it might assert about some actions being no better than others, or the arbitrariness of what actions we might take, we know that some actions taken are preferred to others, that some outcomes are better than others, and that despite the relative foundations of all we experience this does not mean that there is not enough of a foundation with which to assault the most important question of philosophy, “What do I do now?”

To me the central question of philosophy is simply the one that confronts the most basic question in need of an answer for the human condition, and that is the question of agency. That is not to say whether there is human agency or questions of determinism, such questions are near meaningless, the question that philosophy must answer is; what do we do next? This is a question that is forced upon us at every moment of our lives, and at each moment we act (or choose not to) and in this way it is the central concern of the human condition, and it becomes in my mind the most important question that philosophy can answer for the individual. Even those who insist at the top of their lungs that all endeavors or actions are equally worthless cannot escape that at every moment they themselves choose one action over another, and it is this reality of the human condition that lends itself to a non arbitrary application of our decision making powers to the outcomes of our lives.

This in my mind brings philosophy back to its roots and plants it back within the soil from which it was born, making it the study and application of how to live a human life. The art of using philosophy to create for us lives worth living has been at its core through much of its history, and it seems only in modern times that it has lost its way and deviated from this course. The core of philosophy lives in three fields; epistemology, logic and above all ethics.  For in answering the question of what it is that we should do next, we are asking our self an ethical question, we are asking ourselves what is the right action for me to take? In answering such questions philosophy also needs to come down from its theoretical heights and spend some time in the muck of actual human experience. This is where it is most needed, where it was meant to be practiced as made clear by most of the ancients such as the Stoics, Epicureans, Pyrrhonists, Buddhists, and many others. We have forgotten in the modern age that philosophy is not meant to just be discussed, that in order to be relevant it must also be lived. That is a key component that must be reintroduced to philosophy if it is to remain relevant.

While other questions may weigh in on this central question of agency, all other questions stand trivial beside it as the weight of circumstance bears down upon each of us in each passing moment of our lives. Questions of the nature of the universe, the origin of our species, the basis of reality, the reality of volition, all of these become peripheral to dealing with what circumstance has lain before us right now. Why am I here, what is my purpose, why is there something instead of nothing; all of this falls before the more immediate question; I have to pee, do I hold it or go to the bathroom despite the fact that someone is talking to me? The most important questions are not with the fundamentals of the universe, but the everyday questions that we are confronted with every moment of our being.

The Concept of the 'Self"- An Excerpt from The Purple Thread of Epictetus

This is a subject I have been tackling at length over the last month in a book I'm trying to put together. This topic has been particularly difficult, but after a good writing session today on draft three of this chapter I think I have most of what I want covered. There is still a good degree of off topic meandering which needs to be trimmed, some topics addressed too briefly and I'm not entirely happy with some of the opening paragraphs, but on the whole I'm finally content with the body of the chapter as a whole. So with all that said I'd thought I'd share this chapter as it stands for now with everyone. At one point I reference the logic problem known as the Ship of Theseus, which I go over in a previous chapter, I linked the wiki article there as a refresher to those who aren't familiar with it.

Chapter 7- Defining the Self

“…because, of all things in the environment an active body must make mental models of, none is more important than the model the agent has of itself.”

-Daniel C. Dennett

Consciousness Explained 

No object will be more considered than ourselves, as we are the object that we seemingly have the most control over, so it is important that we spend at least a chapter considering what our “self” is. It seems painfully obvious to most of us what we are, “I’m me!” one might protest. Looking a little deeper though it is hard to find exactly what we are, what defines “you” and where we should even start to look. When considering objects back in chapter five we noted the need to see things as they actually are, discover what they are made of and strip them of their pretention. It would be less than thorough if we did not do this to ourselves as well as everything around us. Coming to an honest understanding of what you yourself are is an important part of setting yourself free. Because the subject object of much of your thought will in fact be those things that are in your power or those desires that arise in the mind, it is best to understand the object you will be observing the most, which is yourself.

Rewriting- Because the First Draft Always Sucks

There is a saying  that "there is no such thing as good writing, just good rewriting". I've been doing a lot of rewriting lately, though I'm not quite sure that much of it is really good yet. Although I write much more than the average person, I've never really sat down and tried to write something in book form until this year. Blogging is more of an exercise in stream of consciousness, and other things I had worked on were short enough that rewriting them over and over again never felt like too big of an undertaking. Rewriting hundreds of pages at a time and keeping them at a certain flow, pace, and rhythm all while keeping the entire thing coherent is an undertaking that I wasn't prepared for, or at least I did not expect the sheer level of difficulty that it would pose. I have a new found respect for people that can really sit down and not just tackle the oft mentioned blank page but really take on the one that's already full of that not-good-enough draft that sits before them.

Back in April/May I pounded out a rough draft of the book I'm trying to put together, and I was quite happy with myself that I managed to get all the way through and actually write it. I was thinking to myself at the time that this whole writing thing isn't really all that hard. Once i was done with the first draft I thought it would be easy to just shore up some of those thoughts, reorganize the book a little better and presto, I should be done. It's now the middle of November and I'm forcing myself to fight through draft number three. It has been an excruciatingly slow process, and after sitting down just about every day for the last month, I've managed to get through only about a sixth of the the book. I've spent entire weeks working on seven stupid pages, and still not liked what came out. When I was tearing through my first draft I usually put out at least seven pages every day. The big difference is that I seem to spend far too much time re-reading and not as much time as I'd like re-writing.

Buddhism & Greek Philosophy

Many people who travel to Kathmandu at least have a passing curiosity in the Buddhism that they encounter here. My first trip here in 2002 was my first real exposure to it, following up on the month I had spent looking at Buddhist temples in Thailand. My view of Buddhism then was rather clouded by what I had learned about it via Hollywood and New Age garbage. As someone whose two least favorite actors include Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Gere their speaking up for it didn't increase my interest any. On top of all of that the pop-culture fetish in the US with Buddhism and especially phony causes like Beastie Boys and the whole Free Tibet thing did nothing more to kindle my interest. In fact all of this worked to create a bias in me that would keep me from seeing Buddhism as it should be seen, on its own terms as a serious philosophy.

My trips through Buddhist countries in Asia did very little to change my opinion either. To an outsider, the forms of cultural Buddhism that are practiced through Asia can seem rather odd. Be it offerings of beer and whiskey to divine protectors, or the thousands of divine entities that are present in Tibetan Buddhism all of this works against  seeing Buddhism as a rational philosophy of life, at least it does to me. Touts and hawkers in the tourist districts of these countries don't help any either as they try and "sell" Buddhism through the trinkets that western patrons will buy, be it prayer wheels, crystals, thanka paintings, beads, even whole monk outfits. Some of this can be relevant to philosophical Buddhism, like the thanka paintings, and some can be nonsense, such as the crystals. More importantly though, because tourists regions sell what westerns want to buy, the things that they already think Buddhism consists of, your view of it is unlikely to change passing through these regions.

So strangely my introduction to Buddhism came to me through the Greeks. I have a long standing interest in Alexander the Great, as is evident in some previous posts. That interest lead me to study what happened to the far Eastern Greek Kingdoms after his death, especially the regions of Bactria (present day Afghanistan) and Greek India (essentially modern Pakistan). Many people are unaware that the Greeks and Greek influence would have a major role in this region for about the next three hundred plus years. These years include the rise of the Indian King Ashoka who is credited with being one of the greatest Buddhist proselytizers, as well as the fall of the Maurya dynasty only fifty years later to the Sungas. In fact many beleive that the Greek conquest of India that happened under the Bactrian King Demetrius and later Menander (Who is featured as King Malinda in the Buddhist Malinda Panha) were done on the grounds of defending Buddhists from their new Hindu rulers.

Anyway the mix is not only historically interesting (at least to me) but it also allowed for the transmission of ideas to flow even more readily than they did before between east and west. Historical texts are very clear that many Greek settlers in this region converted to Buddhism, and some texts suggest that the Greeks sent many ethnic Greek Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka and others as far north as the Tarim Basin. No doubt some also traveled back to the Mediterranean to Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt.

It was while reading about some of these transactions that I came across text that showed philosophical Buddhism to be the serious work that it really is. I began to see that there were very strong connections between what it prescribed as a way of dealing with the world around us, and what the Greek stoics taught. In the most basic sense both philosophies teach that since we can not always change the world around us, we must change what we can, which is our opinion and perception of a thing. Both the Greeks and the Buddhists saw that we are not offended by a thing if we remove from ourselves the sense of offence. This got me interested enough to do a good amount of reading to see where Buddhism stands on its own. My misconceptions of Buddhism were plentiful, and this post is long enough without going into full detail.

All of the preceding text was to get to one of the books I just recently read which is one of the better I have read in a long time; Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Now I was vaguely familiar with Greek Pyrrhonist philosophy, but I had always thought it was very similar to the other schools of Greek Skepticism. The excerpts I had seen were from Sextus Empiricus and usually his arguments against the dogmatic beliefs of the stoics. Although i am often a fan of much in stoic thought, the line of attack from Sextus was usually demolishing some part of their line of thinking that I was also not a fan of, such as their teleological outlook or some other claim about nature.

This book shows clearly why Pyrrhonism is not just another branch of Academic Skepticism and instead expounded a philosophy that does not infer the negative from those things we deduce that can not currently be known but instead advises a suspension in judgement about all things non-evident. The parallels with early Buddhism are quite striking, and one could easily view Pyrrhonism as an adaptation of a western form of Buddhism. As someone who has always struggled with epistemology in philosophy as the more problematic field that derailed just about any philosophical endeavor, section three of this book on things evident and non-evident was a real joy to read, and gave me one of those rare "aha!" moments that make the world seem just a little more clearer.

As a quick example, in the west when we experience an apple, we take it that underneath all of our perceptions is a form that actually is an apple. It is from this form that exists in the "real" world that the "real" apple transmits to us the look, touch, taste, and sound (if you tap it) and smell of an apple. The Pyrrhonists (and Buddhists alike) do not assume that there is anything beyond experience itself, that what we experience as an apple is merely a bundle of sensations that are consistently correlated, there is nothing in anyone of them that dictates to the others a sense of "appleness". Put another way if you were blind, you could not infer a visual apple from a tactile, or audible apple. Basically there is no common quality that one can observe in which all these modes of sensation adhere, no underlying substance or form.

Another book that has made it on to my reading list because of this book is Buddhism Without Belief, which seems to be very much in line with Pyrrhonist thinking. Although this will have to wait until I finish A New Stoicism which at this point I unfortunately can not recommend all that highly. While it is a well argued book the author has a way of making even interesting topics excruciatingly boring. It's written in a format that is the result of a terrible habit of spending too much time talking and debating with people only in academia.

100th Post: Evolution of Blog

I started this blog last December, with the intention of having it fill the same roll my other travel websites have filled while I was away from home; as a way to keep in touch with family and friends back home. At first that is exactly what it was, and it never occurred to me that other people might actually be interested in some of this. Slowly I kept seeing an increase in traffic and Kim made some changes to the format and added some links via other expat sites and the traffic increased even more. I even ended up doing some travel writing thanks to an editor coming across my blog, and have since had some other opportunities thanks to readers.

So while I have supplied the writing content on this blog, and the pictures that scroll on the sidebar are mine, I have to give full credit to Kim for really adding the aesthetics and the marketing that  has opened this blog up to a wider audience. After some more changes recently to how posts are labeled and another page layout change recently views on this page are up some 40%. While I'm not getting thousands of views a day like some websites, we'll most likely get about 400 unique views this week from increasingly diverse parts of the planet. So I owe Kim a big thanks for most of this blogs transformation. Someone might wonder what exactly this is transforming into, and that is the purpose of this post.

While I still fully plan on having the occasional opinion piece or a post where I talk about stuff I'm doing in Nepal, I'm also focusing on turning the site into more of a resource for people that plan on spending time in Nepal. The post content won't change dramatically, but I plan on having more reviews of different services from trekking outfits to restaurants as well as adding a better organization of information so that if people are interested in information about the Annapurna circuit for instance they can find it a little easier. I plan on fully expanding that list of restaurants and helpful websites on the side bar as well as creating additional pages that will contain information on different treks or what there is to do in Kathmandu, Pokhara or other locations. I have also noticed that I get a lot of referral trafic from other bloggers that discuss Nepal, and I'll start a sidebar that links back to other Nepal blogs as well. Eventually I would like this to be a fairly central information center to all things Nepal. This won't happen over night, but slowly this is more the direction that the blog is headed to.

At its heart though, this blog is about an American living in Nepal, what happens here and my perspective on it. That's what it will always be most likely. The new things that are being added are to be a resource for people who are travelling to this place I love so much in order that they can get as much out of their time here as possible. Nepal can be a notoriously hard place to find accurate information about what is going on, where stuff is or how things work. I mean this is a country that doesn't have something like a phone book or yellow pages, it's not navigated in the same way as back home. Internet resources are often biased, dated, or both. I'm hoping to kind of fill the gap of lack of good up to date information for what goes on here.

Lastly thanks a bunch to the people who have been reading consistently. I see a lot of repeat traffic and it's great to hear from people who enjoy reading about Nepal and my small place in it. If anyone ever has any questions that they are having trouble answering about something over here, always feel free to ask me via a comment on the blog or via an e-mail to me directly (Brian@harilo.com). So thanks for reading and hopefully this blog can continue to improve over the next hundred posts!

Summer Updates

Summer The monsoons are here and I have a couple of general updates as to what we are up to these days. We have been keeping ourselves quite busy and really enjoying our time here in Nepal.

After a lot of work and prep I think our online shopping company is finally almost ready to hit the ground and really get going. Kim, Akshay and I are all really excited about this companies potential and what we can bring to Nepal. we are formally registered in the U.S. as Harilo Inc. and in Nepal we will be Harilo Pvt. Ltd. and this Nepali entity should be finished a little over a week from now. Akshay has put a lot of programming into the new website, and all of us have been working to make sure that the user experience flows seamlessly. We hope to be opening up the website to online orders when the company is formally recognized by the government of Nepal.

Reading, Writing and Trading

As a short follow up to my last post, I have almost been able to make the bread correctly, I can't quite get it to full with air like it's supposed to, but I get it close and it tastes good enough to eat. I still have no idea how to get meat, and I think about all I would trust to order is the chicken, but I haven't had the time or inclination to ask a butcher here yet. Kim also has noted I should update on the post before that, and all I have to say is the antibiotics did their work and I'm fine.

So with that out of the way we can move on to todays topic which is what the hell are we doing. Kim seems to have maintained a fair amount of her work and has been busy with much of the same real estate marketing, web design, flyers and whatever else she has been doing for the last few years. I didn't bring my work with me, so I have had to try and find something new. At first it looked like it might be getting involved with trekking, but that is looking like it really isn't the way to go. The whole teaching thing looks like kind of a bust too as the pay is just dismal. The only apparent reason to possibly pursue that in the future would be if other visa options look to dry up.

So what have I been doing? Well aside from working to get ourselves settled, find our lost luggage, get the apartment and everything that went inside of it, running around the mountains for a week and being bed ridden for another half week, I have been reading writing and looking into trading. So the reading part first I guess. I've been on a big kick of reading Buddhist and Stoic philosophers as of late. Just before leaving I read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Steven Asma's The God's Drink Whiskey (about Buddhism in South East Asia). I've followed these up with reading a couple other somewhat forgettable books on Buddhism as well as Epictetus' Enchiridion and Discourses Book one and two. Although I am not about to become a convert to either camp, Buddhism isn't nearly as silly as I once thought it was, and some of the God and Nature overtones aside, I really am impressed with the stoics. The other book that I have gone back and reread is Consciousness Explained by Dennett. This was one of my all time favorites and the last time I read it was the leading cause for me dropping out of Orono. Explaining this might require a post all its own, let's just say there was a professor who literally should have been in an elderly home, not teaching, there are mental patients who could have given more accurate appraisals of this books chapters. Anyway it's good to read the book again, so moving on.

So writing. I've always been in the habit of writing, some blogs, some stupid long e-mails about MMOs we might have been playing, stuff for games, and at times even stuff for work. I've written a good amount of political analysis (how many people do you know who picked Sarah Palin before McCain announced it?) and at times even attempted short stories or whatever. At least for the last few weeks I've been organizing some of my thoughts on philosophy and religion, an old topic for me that I had in many ways long ago abandoned. Prior to my departure for Kathmandu I had read a bunch of books on the Greeks in Bactria (the Stans) and India. This got me interested in the exchange of thought between the east and west, and in particularly the stoics and Buddhists. That lead to my reading list in the last paragraph and caused me to want to kind of revisit the topic again. We'll see if it leads to anything.

All of this is great, but it isn't making me any money, or getting me a visa. So my other project is creating a company here in Kathmandu as well as registering it as a legal entity in the US. What I would like to do is export goods from here wholesale so people back in the US can sell them. I'll be putting a catalog together at some point in the near future. The idea is to sell the products and the marketing materials so people back in the US are informed about what they are selling, where it came from and even who made it. We'd like to provide pictures, pamphlets and in depth descriptions of the products. We also want to approach it with a fair trade angle donating some proceeds to good NGO's like Girl's Education Nepal. The wheels have started turning on this and I'll provide updates as it becomes more concrete.