are you looking inside or outside?

23/02/2014

I had just paid for my food in the self-service café. Before going out to one of the tables in the courtyard, I looked around for cutlery. Seeing none, I asked the man at the till where it might be found. He replied, “It’s outside, you’ve been looking for it inside!” I laughed.

Usually, we make the opposite mistake. We look on the outside for things which are only to be found on the inside. In particular, we look for sources of happiness outside of ourselves. We expect relationships, jobs, governments and innumerable other things to make us happy. But the source of our happiness, or unhappiness, is on the inside. We have been looking in the wrong place!

greed

02/02/2014

Greed is one of the ugliest of human characteristics. Selfishness steers us to want more for ourself than for others, more even than for friends and family, people we purport to love. It is probably there in all of us, at least in a latent form. I saw it recently in another, coming from an unexpected quarter at an unexpected time. It filled me with a great sadness. My heart felt hollow and empty. How such greed separates us from each other! It tears a great rift between friends, seemingly unbridgeable.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all about this miserable happenstance is that whatever I see in others, I know is also in myself. How tragic to be shown, by that unfailing mirror of the other, the horror of greediness which must yet reside in me.

Reading the world news, with its unwavering focus on agony, it is clear that all the anguish which we humans inflict on one another is driven by such avarice.

The despair would be unbearable if it were not for the certainty that life maintains a balance. For every act borne of greed, somewhere there is a small act of kindness coming into the world, borne of the love which we humans also hold for one another.

To be human is to have all of this within oneself – the ugliness and the beauty. To acknowledge it all, to accept that it is a part of one, is a difficult yet necessary step on the path to wholeness.

dispersal

29/01/2014

My father died recently and yesterday we buried his ashes. As I gently poured the ashes into an earthenware pot, a gust of wind whipped a few of the ashes up and whisked them away, scattering them far and wide.

After death, we can see what happens to the physical body, the way its constituents are broken down and dispersed, to be taken up by myriad other forms of life, in time becoming a part of many other beings. That is the visible, manifest aspect of death. What of the less visible aspects of life? What happens to consciousness at death? Does it cease to exist? Or does it, too, disperse in some way? And what of our essence, the spirit? Does it simply become non-existent? Or does it disperse in its own way, returning to the source whence it came?

In the short blink of an eye which is a human lifetime, various constituents come together to form a human being. Yet even during life, these constituents are changing, coming and going. Even life is an ongoing process of melding and dispersal. There is nothing solid in life, nothing unchanging anywhere to be found, and nothing separate from the rest of existence.

returning to life in a hammock

27/12/2013

After a couple of years living a relatively settled life, based in Kuwait, I find myself back on the road. I have never in my life owned a house or apartment, so renting a place – like I did in Kuwait – is as close as I come to having a fixed abode. Now I am adjusting once more to a life of no fixed abode, living out of a backpack and moving on from place to place as the whim takes me.

It’s such a great way to be in the world! And here in Brazil, this way of being includes plenty of time spent in hammocks. Some of the simplest inventions are the best and the humble hammock is surely in that category. It is in the very nature of a hammock to induce relaxation in one – not only a physical relaxation, a mental relaxation too. There’s something about the feeling of being supported and cocooned, together with that gentle swaying, that slows down the brainwaves, inducing one, through some mystical alchemy, to stop worrying; Ultimately to stop thinking.

A hammock and a meditation stool are the only pieces of furniture a human being needs. And if I keep honing my hammock skills, even the meditation stool might become redundant!

dance a tango with god

15/09/2013

[The following is an extract from a letter which I wrote to a friend. I felt to share it more widely.]

So, beloved, you see that whilst all the teachings of Advaita are technically correct, I laugh at it all. Because what is the point in feeling beauty and turning it into the word 'beauty', which is not beauty. The thinking mind turns everything to stone.

The breath of God and your pulsating heart, dancing a tango, that is truth, that is reality, that is real, that is beauty. But not the description of it. Not my comment about it. Not even your memory of it. But at the time, in the dance, when there is only the dance. And that dance might be a tango as you pretend not to be interested in God, or pretend to be afraid of letting in God, of admitting God, of admitting that you are God. But there is a communion even in a tango, and a delicious communion at that. Yes, it is a foreplay. Those who dance the tango, if the dance feels right, make love later on. But you don't need to worry about that. Enjoy the dance, enjoy taking the tango to the very brink and dancing there on the edge of abandonment. And if your mind cannot be quiet even in that dance, let it be only curious as to who will surrender first to the truth of lust: you or God. And know all the time, with every breath and every throbbing heartbeat of the dance, that underneath the lust that God feels for you and that you feel for God, there is only love. But in that love, there is no you and there is no God. There is only love.

uninvited meditation

24/08/2013

Sometimes meditation can happen without our bidding it. For the last couple of days, a fever has been in me. It started as the full moon approached and reached a peak that night. Thoughts could not form themselves properly. The solid bed on which I was resting was felt to be gently swaying. The walls seemed to be gently undulating. My awareness came to rest on the sensations in the body: hot and cold at the same time, with dramatic energy flows. When my attention was completely with this energy, it felt pleasant, very pleasant.

All this was a reminder that the way we perceive the world is not determined purely by what is out there, it also depends on the temperature and chemistry of the brain. Perception is a dance, an interplay. Where in this do we find reality?

On another subject, today I am celebrating having survived 50 laps of the sun. By my, albeit dubious calculation, that means that I have travelled about 35,000,000,000 kilometres, without making much effort, and I find myself pretty much back where I started. That sounds just like the spiritual journey!

[Correction: I looked up the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 150 million km. On that basis, the 35 billion km in the text above should be 47,000,000,000 km.]

can we allow ourselves to enjoy life?

22/08/2013

Here in Thailand I have taken to sunbathing on a sand bank in the middle of the lagoon. The sand bank is only above the water at low tide. With the incoming tide, it is gradually immersed in the clear tropical water.

I like to bathe on the sand bank just as the tide is rising. The sun warms the skin of my naked body, whilst little wavelets splash me, providing just enough cooling for the body to feel comfortable. As the water deepens to a few inches, those incoming ripples rock the body in a gentle, playful massage.

The sunlight glints on the dancing water, in a mesmerising display, whilst tiny fish flit about me. All this is being given to me for free, without any effort on my part.

I am left wondering, how good can life get? How much pleasure do we have the capacity to feel? And the real challenge in life, it seems to me, is to allow oneself to enjoy it all to the full.

Let’s start by enjoying the full moon tonight!