Image: Sunrise in Arambol, 2024
Everything dies. Does that make it a good reason to live intensely or to live with detachment? What if the ideal life is one where you live intensely, able to accept graciously all the changes of life? I want to live like that. To me, to live in tune with the flow of the heart and the pull of the inner compass, that feels right.
Much of this life is invisible, its workings hidden from our eyes. Only yesterday, I read that the Himalayas are growing at 2mm per year. Seems almost negligible the growth, but for even that much growth, seismologists say there is great tectonic turmoil going on underneath. Isn’t that fascinating to think about? That the earth works just like our bodies? We don’t pause for a moment to think about the blood and veins running underneath our skin, the many processes, muscles, bones, organs and microorganisms within our body contributing to each stroke of the key, each utterance of word, each easy or not-so-easy bodily movement. We ourselves are hidden and unknown to ourselves most of the time. So, how can we live truly and well with our eyes shut to who we are?
This invisible working is not just of the body, but of the mind contained in the body. Over the last two days, I felt such strong emotions come and knock inside my mind. Images vivid and desires pictorial, arrived much like an inner storm. I stopped after reading the piece about the Himalayas and wondered. This inner storm was a moment of manifestation like an earthquake is a moment of manifestation of what’s been going on under the surface. How many impressions, unconscious patterns and thoughts, fateful life experiences had contributed to my inner landscape for these 30 years to bring me to this point? If after so much trying, if this was all I could see, what if I would always be a little lost and arriving at understanding only after something had happened?
I felt myself shrug at these questions. I don’t think I have the answers; perhaps I don’t really want them, yet. For now, let’s see how into the depth and distance of my inner lands I can see.
I am reminded of a quote I read, stumbling onto it in the school library about a decade back. I think it prefaced one of Jung’s editions of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections.” The quote goes like this:
““He looked at his Soul with a Telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and showed to be beautiful Constellations; and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
Your posts are so introspective. Living in the here and now. Living one day at a time. And living those hours well, is the key, I believe, to a life that's real and of value. All else is delusion. There's no way of knowing the future and the past is past.