Clean and Dirty
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
I was watching the waters of the Ganges flowing through the town of Rishikesh, India. I’d heard that the Sadhus, or holy men, said those words about the river to explain why the holy Ganges looked like a garbage dump. I must have been really enlightened that day, because with vision better than Superman’s I could see the E. coli, the hepatitis A, B and C, the typhoid and cholera and dysentery swirling downstream.
I was trekking a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. The only sign of life was an ink black beetle walking carefully on blue ice. My Super Vision was also working that day. 
I scanned the vastness all around, intoxicated with the way the ice ripped into the sky. I saw no disease of any kind, not a single speck of trash anywhere. That’s because if you bring trash there you also have to take it out. If the Argentine park rangers find that you’ve left any, they will unsheathe their ice axes, dig a grave for you and dump you in; I think that’s the rule, anyway. The ice is so clean that you can mix it with whiskey and drink it down, using it to jump start your heart so you are able to walk the trail back to the boat that circles icebergs, to the little bus bouncing on a gravel road, to your room where you will finally be warm again.
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
Was the voice of that holy man trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as “pure” perception? Sometimes your eyes don’t see what they’re seeing? Could I have been distracted by all the noise and chaos that is India? Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This is where science comes in handy. It can measure stuff, and researchers at Montana State University have concluded that the Ganges contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes.
“The Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.”
– Dr. Tim Ford, Montana State University
Scientists can also measure how fast glaciers are melting in Patagonia and elsewhere, documenting climate change. So you might conclude that human perception, filtered by memory and experience, won’t get you far when trying to prove anything. For example, if you come from a dirty place, India may look clean to you. If you come from a noisy place, Patagonia may seem unbearably still. Without objective measurement, you get into “everything is relative.” Messy business.
Spiritual folks will tell you that faith helps you experience the unseen. (“Is that the face of Jesus on my bathroom wall?”) For the science-minded, this notion is easy to dismiss. But this is tricky territory. Some scientists are doubting whether we can really measure anything objectively – that the consciousness of the investigator changes the outcome, for one thing.
When science meets spirit, when objective measurement meets faith, could it be that boundaries of both science and spirit are going to be changed?
That makes my mind spin, and thankfully I notice I’m over 500 words – but I will continue this thought in another blog. No matter what the Sadhu says, I’m not going in the Ganges.
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