How do you move from Idealism to Reality?

I suppose one method might be "Culture Shock". The worst case of culture shock I have ever experienced was going from Nepal into India in Bihar province when I was 37. This level of shock I likely will never get over in a way. I was grateful to be 37 before I had to witness that level of poverty with dead bodies often places I went unattended sometimes in the middle of the streets then in 1985. However, it was also one of the most important things that ever happened to me. REALITY BITES US IN THE ASS! And reality bit me and my children and my wife in the Ass as we rode a bus into Bihar from Raxaul, India to Bodhgaya and Gaya by Bus.

Let me tell you what happened. It turns out Raxaul is a place where things are smuggled between Nepal and India. So, a lady walks up to my family and I on the bus and says" Stand up" and procedes to put something under our seats. Then later a policeman is searching under all the seats of the bus but ours. "Why?" Because we are westerners and they don't want trouble with westerners (Europeans or Americans or Canadians or whatever) simply because they could lose their jobs very easily and never get antoher one and have to beg as a policeman or Police woman.

We didn't find this out until later. Then after all this we didn't know where to go and the likely leader of the smugglers who was riding in the bus told us where to go. This was our introduction into India.

I call it "Reality therapy".

We were completely unprepared for what we faced as westerners. Nothing was the same as we had expected. Everything was different. And as a father and as a husband I had no idea what to expect next at all. But, we were treated well by everyone, except it is a different standard than I might have expected.

My then 14 year old Stepson said it best: "These people think we are gold Plated ET's or something!"

And that is the best way to say it. The majority of people we saw on the bus had never been one day to a school anywhere. 40% to 60% of the people couldn't read or write or anything like this in any language then. So, to most people we saw we were literally UFOS. This was reality like we were on a completely different planet. And unless we could be really really adaptable we were not going to survive here.

The point being "Unless you are where the rubber meets the road how can you expect to cope with your life anywhere on earth?"

Note: By the way Raxaul (at least when I went there 33 years ago this December or January was not a tourist attraction or anything like that. It is simply one of the main border towns between Nepal and India in Bihar province on the India side. My point was that reality will "Bite you in the Ass" often and this was one of the big bites reality took out of me and my family. Luckily we survived all this. But, if you only live in an idealistic reality what happens when reality bites you?

For example, at the time we went to India and Nepal we had a sort of California New Age version in our minds of India and Nepal. Well, if you actually talk to people there that isn't it at all. What you actually get is something much more practical if you are open to it if you ever visit there.

In India you have a Spiritual Scientific community that goes back 10,000 years. You have Sanskrit a sacred ancient language that Hindi, Tibetan and Russian all evolved from. You have amazing cultural differences between the western world and the eastern world. You have all these things and more.

We are very very ethnocentric just like the Chinese and Russians here in the U.S. We think we are better than everyone else on earth. As you travel you see this isn't really true. There are no stupid people on earth really. What you see is people in each culture have different priorities, and as you study them you realize why they have different priorities and usually they are not wrong to have come up with different priorities than we have in the U.S.

In the end maybe all priorities are personal and private more than they are public.

So, judging peoples before you understand what they are actually about is a form of bigotry and ignorance (and it also tends to cause wars).