The full bowl of emptiness

The empty bowl full silence and peace. Luscious Ladakh! Full of pristine emptiness! So close to the unmanifest! Feels so so away from noise, chaos and clutter of our creations. 

A rainbow on the wings

The tiny tailorbird is always in earnest, noisy and imperturbable. It keeps on letting out monitorial tweets about anything and everything. It sounds sharp and forbidding, a kind of sword-in-hand-fighter. The green guy with tautly drawn tail seems livid about the way things are managed in the world. On sultry monsoon noons its cheeup-cheeup-cheeup ruckus has alerted me many times about a reptilian encroachment in the yard. It is such a small bird but the wondrous hardihood of raillery and persuasive eloquence might force you to bow down to it and say, ‘Hailed be thy cause Your Greatness!’

Oriental magpie robin is a very happy looking black and white bird. It has an exciting cavalcade of notes and sounds. A look at it gives you a feeling that it’s a very cheerful bird. It’s quite magisterial in looks; the prominent black and white gives the impression of a lawyer’s attire. I have never heard it sad and sullen. During the monsoons its freely cantering verses of love are a treat to listen. Its positive spirit is wholeheartedly revealing, so much so that you feel good after listening to its songs.

The only other guy who can beat the magpie robin in lyrical positivity is the white-browed fantail flycatcher. The birdie chap resonates with fun with his mesmerizing dips and dives to catch fleas. He seems very free; beyond fear and its consequential rigidities. He flip-flops artistically and sings with voluminous range of notes. I have never felt him to be desperate; his is a relaxed foray, almost a play with the fleas even though they have to pay with their lives if they lose in the game. A fun-loving guy basically, he spreads his white-edged fantail while he modulates and varies his notes. The notes sound lovely. His best signature note is ee-ee-oo-oo-aa-aa, a distinct composition for love, which is basically a lively whistle of six notes. Well, sometimes he modifies it to make it of eight notes.

The peacocks look beautiful but their hoot is too candid and much acerbic. It pierces one’s ears a bit ruefully. It’s meticulously ebullient with high-pitched notes capable of dislodging the ball of wax in one’s ears. They are the national bird so giving them more share of fame I would say their peee-hooo siren call sounds boldly virtuous shout of a rigorist.

The sparrows have chirpy effervescence. It carries the pleasant hustle and bustle of the birdie world. Their chorus is pretty coherent. It can raise one’s spirit on a bleak dawn.

The crow has vivid but confounding notes for human ears—as if the guy is busy in sharpening his cleverness and use it against the humans. Many times his cawing almost scoffs at the listener.

The babblers hurl their twein-twein-twein domineeringly. They are always miffed at something and protest vociferously. If the koel is classical, they are plainly massical. They launch their te-te-te as if in pursuance of a long unsettled dispute.

The doves are mostly silence-wreathed but when they speak—except the laughing dove which seems to laugh even while she is crying—they carry distant or blurred notes of pain and suffering. They are for relaxing and complacency; don’t carry the zipping enthusiasm usually seen among the birds.

I don’t have the mesmerizing and bewitching whistling thrush around me. But the coucal, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum in tone and melody, sometimes comes from the farmside and gives a factory hooter kind of echoing call. It sounds an exuberant denial of the humans’ sole right to shout.

Oriental white eyes raise barely audible little trills of anklet bells—an elegant softly jingling rhetoric if you care to listen to the complaints of such a little bird.

The red-vented bulbul’s notes carry lots of emotive significance. Their name sounds lyrical and poetic but they are always mired in competing concerns with fellow birds of all species. When angry they become awfully confounding even to a human watching the show.

The wire-tail swallows let out finely crafted chip-chip sounds as they swiftly dart in airy spaciousness, picking up midges midair and even chipping a lice from your head if you dare to come near their mud nest.

There are genuine echoes of mother nature in their—the birds—calls. In a world cluttered with controversies, I listen to their calls. Their chattering is a treat during the peaceful, intimate pre-dawn air. Wherever or whoever you are, mentally bruised, homeless, dissident or outcast, listen to the call of birds. Even if your world is crumbling, listen to the birds. No words, no advice, no preaching—just the sound of mother nature. They are the threads to the silence of trees. The trees are the threads to stones. And the voiceless threads of mute stones are the passage to the womb of nothingness. But to begin with listen to the birds. 

The master ceasefire catalyst

Ceasefire is a lovely term. With ceasefire, India, Pakistan and Trump all claimed victories in their own terms. With ceasefire, Israel, Iran and Trump again claimed their own versions of victories. Let's hope there comes a day when the same word 'ceasefire' allows Russia, Ukraine and Trump to claim their share of victories. In the ceasefire equation, it's clearly visible that Trump is a nice catalyst  agent. A powerful ceasefire agent. He used trade to facilitate the Indo-Pak ceasefire. He used B-2 bombers to effect the Iran-Israel ceasefire. Now the onus is on him to decide what catalyst role does he play to bring about Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. If he does it, I think he will be a very strong contender for the Nobel peace prize. Above all, let's celebrate this ceasefire. After all, millions of common Israeli and Iranians, who have no role in causing this war, can go to sleep peacefully after many harrowing nights. Furthermore, let's pray for peace in Gaza as well. The 'two-state solution' is the best. Let there be a safe and strong Israel. Let there be a Palestine state. And let Iran remove the Israel-annihilation clause from its state policy.

The small world of a poetic man

 

The birds seem to hold a nobler form of love. Wild free-will carried by their wings. The reflection of love on the screen of life seems tranquil, chirpy though, and wholesome. We on the other hand carry lots of false modesty on the grand old mule track of love. Our reasoning gets clouded with passion. Our emotions spin colossal tangle as we walk on the woodcutter trails in the forest of love.

Men are mostly snapping their jaws like sunning alligators trying to eat butterflies—to quench the insatiable hunger as well as provide amusement to the bored self. And women, beautifully enigmatic and amusing, scented breeze in their tresses, ravaging silence behind their gossips, they almost borrow happiness at a hard price in a male-dominated world. They have their pain and undulations while hanging between lucidity and illusion.

But the birds possess a nobler form of love, as I mentioned earlier. The wire-tail swallow couple, for example. They are the resident birds in the neighborhood. I see them flying around for most of the year. They are extra active during the monsoons. In the musty, humid air of July and August, they reflect extra dose of love, of being together, of caring and sharing. Despite their chipping quick notes, airy swirls and swift flapping of wings their love seems calm. Lyrical and real; very natural without any superfluous infusion.

Unlike young clandestine lovers in some town in a deeply conservative society, all sly and telling a lyrical lie, foul words stamped on perfumed paper with a luminous ink, the birds are free to spread their love on free wings.

The monsoon breeze is cooler. The swallows have a permanent nesting place on the verandah ceiling. They always modify the last year’s mud nest. There is a cable going over the yard and I see them making love on it after fixing the house. It’s never a hurried and pushed love like we humans. First they take their duties of setting up the nest and only then they allow themselves some pleasure. They seem so light—devoid of the extra weight of wisdom and knowledge. They are contended with the primitive trinket—mother nature’s raw bouquet of life and living—and do full justice to it till death’s slingshot brings them down.

There is a very lucid conviction in what and how they do it. But the mankind is different. Our love’s character is furrowed by pain. We are caught in childish entanglements with dramatized perseverance. The funny authors of our own huge shame and tiny fame. We die every moment to sign in the gold book of life. The streets are vice-ridden and in disarray, crowded with distinguished, arrogant and prejudiced people. The scene revolting and ridiculous. Duplicities drizzling. Ingenuous villainies abounding. Mirrored doors stop this street clamor and try to retain the beautified and glorified private interiors holding little patches of succulent swamps. An effort to create a minute trace of picture-card peace. Gold thread embroidery on the muddy clothes mired in arduous morass. Cosmetics layered over enfeebled charms. Almost like an illicit dose of love—like a married man climbing into a widow’s bed.

Beyond all this, I try to acknowledge and admit the possibility of real, natural love in the human world.

She, the wire-tail swallow lady, is plump now, carrying eggs. They are usually comfortable with my presence but sometimes play mischief and swiftly almost graze my just-shaven head, chipping away with a birdie joke maybe.

They do it now as I watch the labored journey of an earthworm in the yard. It started from a corner very early in the morning and after three hours I see it just a dozen feet from the destination, a little wet flowerbed with fresh mud. It seems a very adventurous earthworm. Luck, as they say, favors the brave. It has beaten many accidental possibilities in reaching this far in the journey. It’s a lovely sight to witness such a fruitful homecoming. To add my helping share to its struggle, I decide to keep a watch till it reaches home to undo any risk because there are many a slip between the cup and lips.

A squirrel has shifted her base. It had its nest outside the wall among the clumps of trees. But there are snakes there, so possibly it’s changing house to avoid encounter with the reptiles. So looking for a better lodge for its little ones it has made a nest of cloth strips, cotton and dry grass high among the branches of the parijat tree in the garden. There it comes bounding from under the gate’s lower grills, its kid held in mouth. It almost bumps into my feet as I stand guard to see the earthworm safely home. It takes a sharp turn and looks worried from a distance. A mother shouldn’t be stopped like this. So I move away and here it comes and climbs the tree to show their new place to the kid.

Musing Monkey and Mediating Monk

 

A musing monkey and a meditating monk are simply two of the aspects of ‘being’ among the infinite ways of ‘being’ in mother existence. I celebrate life and its varied colors. I enjoy the musing monkey tricks of my own self (which I take as the mind, an all-pervading entity coursing through my psychosomatic system). I feel the joy of its stabler version as well—the meditating self.

To me mother existence is like a rose plant—lovely fragrant flowers, leaves, thorns, hard stem, roots, earth. Will the flower exist without the thorns? There is a unity of being. One aspect supports the other. A musing and mirthing monkey is somewhere and somehow is the cause (as well as effect) of a meditating monk and vice-versa. The main thing is the celebration of life. I enjoy the spectacle of musing and jumping monkeys. Watching their antics is a funny game. I deeply respect meditating monks—stable, peaceful people, carried by a cosmic frequency to bloom as flowers in their lovingly isolated (but subtly united) selves. But at a deeper level, these flowers are also the gist of the pain of many thorns. A thing of beauty is joy forever and for all. So let’s pay our respects to the meditating monks. But let us also take time to enjoy (and be) musing monkeys also. Because in the endless fabric of interconnected existence, musing monkeys and meditating monks are two faces of the same coin.

Basically, I feel like a bee musing over varied flowers (even thorns) taking sips of the nectar that I need both for physical necessity as well as the need born of the aesthetic hunger. It feels good to be able to appreciate something in everything. It gets you a kind of fluidity and flow in life. Somehow, I don’t feel like getting cast in a strict mould of a particular ideology, belief system, religion or sect. In my opinion, being cast in a particular belief system sets up a rigidity around one’s existence. But it’s obviously one’s sovereign choice and rightly so. We should never judge and compare. Every ounce of this existence is unique and that’s what makes it marvelous and miraculous, yet so simple and innocent. There should be absolutely no problem if you feel comfortable in a solitudional space, which you work out for yourself with single-minded focus, iron-clad determination and steely willpower.

I really appreciate and bow down to those who show marvelous perseverance in setting up an oasis in their life while walking through a harsh desert. It’s like striving for the full flowering of the self. It’s as good for the others as it’s for the self. Isn’t a flower meaningful and helpful to so many lives—to the artist, to the bees, to a child? Isn’t an oasis a source of joy and life to many weary travelers who take rest in it after struggling the sandstorms in the desert?

So let’s celebrate this life, this marvelous interplay of forms, shapes, emotions and thoughts born of the same sea of energy, the ripples in the same sea. Let’s enjoy this innocent skirmish between two ripples—a mediating monk and a musing monkey. There are no lessons to be drawn from this innocent interaction, no philosophy to be churned out, no morals to be spun out. Because these are mere opinions of two seekers on their own paths. Two waves crashing into each other playfully before moving on to take many other forms in the lap of Father Sea. 

Tibetan Buddhism is one of the most pristinely preserved belief systems. There was a time when every Tibetan family had a full monk or nun devoted to keep the lineage going. Tibet had more monks than soldiers. Imagine the spiritual depth of this vast land during those times. Then tragedy struck. Atheist China put a big challenge for the Tibetans to preserve their unique culture and religion. Scattered over different countries in tiny communities, Tibetans still hold onto their faith with devotional perseverance.

I know a few lovely Tibetan Buddhist sadhaks, one of them a deeply, spiritually imbued woman sadhak. She is a good friend. She was out of radar for the last three years and I was worried about her. But the other day it came as a relief to know that she was fine. She was in a remote cave in a totally uninhabited part of Ladakh. Faith makes you quite daring on the path and pushed by the same force she carried her basic provisions on six pack horses and trekked for one full day to reach a remote cave. She meditated here for three years in complete isolation.

I am amazed at the spiritual passion of the Tibetan Buddhists to maintain their legacy. It’s a vast domain of esoteric, mystical practices. I myself don’t believe in extreme austerity on the path of religion and feel comfortable with Buddha’s middle path, but I respect such honest seeking by someone on the path of realizing the true Self.

She is back to her east Asian country at the moment and sends me a mesmerizing collection of pictures. The pictures from her spiritual hideout somewhere in Zanskar, Ladakh are unbelievably grand, almost mythically exciting.

It was a little cave-cum-room away from a remote hamlet in Zanskar, beyond the glutinous knick-knacks of crowded worldliness; in unmoored, unfettered, uncontrolled, untouched, unmoved, untrammeled barren hills; among stones and a few wild streams. Using her woman’s skills to mold her surroundings in the colors of her aesthetic sense, she covered the tiny hovel with colorful Buddhist murals, cloth paintings and carpets covering the entire walls. And there trying to come out of the zigzag course of follies, she—surrounded by the colorful syrupy souvenirs of faith—sits down to meditate to realize the straight, simple path to wisdom.  

Emptiness here is clearly defined by miles of barren brown canvas, pristine blue of the sky, pure white of the clouds, a rippling stream in the gorge down the slope and howling mountain gales. Here she would look into the distances, witnessing the nature’s avatar as a serrated knife on the one end and a wisp of wool on the other. As she sat exploring the miles of emptiness in her heart, the cutting mountain wind went harping on the sturdiest stones and the clouds melted in the pristine blue.

In winter she would sit down under the falling snow on the frozen banks of the once gurgling stream. The rushing blue liquid in a thin line between the frozen banks. Her maroon great cape cradling her physical body while the soul kissed the snows on the slopes around.

Mother nature slowly filled its few colors on the almost empty canvas. Brown fire on sunlit slopes. Blue snows on the shadowed slopes. Massive boulders beaten and shaped by the wind stood like ferocious demonic sentries protecting her isolated haunt. The sentinels of this isolation singing with the mountain winds. A leafless bush standing like a torn banner of summers; but still holding up the hopes for a revival. The subdued murmur of the thin stream between frozen banks carrying the prayers alive to burst forth with the songs of summer some day.

Her neighbor would be a tiny sparrow peeping with curiosity from the makeshift window sill, wonderstruck at the tiny cocoon of colors inside.

She would muse over a rainbow above the chocolate brown hills against dark grey clouds, its arc vanishing into the clouds suspended like hanging waterfalls of wool. Then the summer would have sparse grass and wild little flowers. She would hold a flower and muse over the irresistible force that life is, always fighting to come out of snows and stones; the iron will of a little seed to stay under the snows and burst forth with joy as the summer sun melted the snow sheets.

She would peek into the sky where the little fluffs of clouds floated in a mauve sea of tranquility. And all this would again transform into iciness, all cloaked in thick snows, just a few very steep snowless slopes visible. A perfect sun beating on a blinding blizzard of white. The sky flawlessly dark blue, not a speck of cloud. With the warmth of her faith cloaked in her maroon woolen cape she would sit to meditate on the snow. A drop of pious blood of life on the white icy face of death.

A few fluffy sparrows would sit meditatively with eyes closed on the little grain bowl. The snowy desolation making it feel remoter; the deep blue of the sky condensing the mystery even further, but drawing it still nearer to the soul. The strings of prayer flags hanging languidly with their sagged but discernible multiple colors: an effort of putting meaningful colors among the binary of white and blue prevailing around.

A flock of dozens of pigeons busy in searching among the partially visible dead grass on the frozen slope below her window, picking the grains of life, to fly, to play. Like an excited girl, catching to some innocent strand of harmless fun that she had in childhood, to see their fluttering flight in a flock, to play like a girl, to feel the excitement of the flight of the pigeons, she would move the creaking window. A lovely little prank with the birds in that snowy wilderness. And they would lift with a flutter and swoop down the valley.

Her only neighbors the birds playing on the snow-beaten dry grass, chirping to keep warm, grabbing some grass seed, some wisp of food for preserving life in this cold desert. Sometimes she saw flocks of gorals, the muscled, nimble essence of what the barren stones have to offer in the form of the beaten grass.

Then one day right in the middle of meditation two policeman arrived bearing a letter signed by the Senior Superintendent of Police-cum-FRO, district Kargil, copied to the SHO police station Zanskar. It accused her of illegally overstaying at Shadey village (for this was the nearest village) in Zanskar after the expiry of e-visa which had been extended by one year after the expiry of the initial one. The extension visa had expired six months ago. In her innocence she had even forgotten that boundaries existed in this divided world. She thought they would just forget her. So she hadn’t applied for further extension. The notice directed her to leave the country within ten days.

The policemen said, ‘Please leave India because your visa expired long ago.’ They were gentle people, didn’t scare her, so she served them tea and thought maybe she could mollify them. She replied, ‘I’m not going because I’m just meditating here and playing with animals. I am not meeting anyone, not doing anything bad against India.’ They laughed at her elementary schoolgirl’s pure innocence. How she wished there were no borders!

With a heavy heart she had to say a goodbye to the lovely pink colors of a dawn peeping over the dark brown hills as the day arrived. 

I had been sending her one-liner messages to know any update about her on Facebook and WhatsApp for the last three years. No response. The messages stood undelivered. Then she surfaced.

‘Hello, it’s me. I just finished a three year retreat in the mountains, everything is fine! Don’t worry! I will keep in touch with you,’ she assures me about her safety.

‘I’m glad mother existence gave you these golden hours of silence and seclusion. Let your path be showered with sunshine of awareness,’ I’m relieved that this nice woman, who reads my books and whom I met at Majnu Ka Tila Tibetan colony in Delhi over Tibetan tea and tsampa bread, is safe and well on her path to self realization.

‘I wanted to do a retreat for three years but now my visa is expired, so I have come back to Hanoi. So many wonderful experiences. I will tell you later. Now I am taking another five months of meditation and practicing speaking again. I have not spoken for almost three years now. Sometimes I will. Will send messages to you,’ she wrote.  

She seemed to be gingerly tottering back to the worldly clatter after that near perfect peace in the Himalayas. We had a deep exchange of messages over the coming week, I as a curious seeker and she as someone who is already at a very stable frequency.

‘You were in India all this time?! Vow… I was in Ladakh for two weeks this summer. Had I known I would have come to meet you,’ I’m excited like a child.

‘It would have been very difficult for you to access my hideout. I had to use six horses to carry my things and walk for a day to reach my hideout,’ she is very excited about this feat of isolating herself in an alien environment.

‘Are you into secret tantrik mystical Tibetan Buddhist practices?’ I ask because I feel that maybe she is into something very esoteric in nature.

‘I can’t tell you all. But I’m back home. The Indian police moved me, asking me to leave India immediately because my visa expired six months ago,’ I can feel traces of sadness in her messages. Why do the borders exist for such sincere mediators, I wonder.

‘Kindly share the wonderful experiences when you have time. I can try writing on these,’ I request.  

‘It is difficult to talk about my experiences during my days of retreat in the Himalayas. My mind was completely empty and there was only a gentle joy in enjoying everything around me. If you want to write something about it you must send me a list of your questions, because I do not know where to start and cannot describe to you my nameless joy. My meditation hours were always consecutive but did not put pressure on me. I did not use language but communicated by communion with the environment and the animals. Silence for me did not become heavy but a sweet absorption of stillness. I communed with the sound of the wind, of the river and the birds, the howling of wolves when the snow came. Each and every sound went straight to my heart and was very gentle. I can talk about my feelings all day long but for you to write it down you have to give me your list of questions, because I cannot tell you my experience in solid bullet points. I can only tell you that peace in emptiness always takes over me,’ her soul feels satiated with joy. I can feel this in each of her words.

I take closer looks at the pictures sent by her. It’s simply incredible. Even in virtual two dimensions they speak countless volumes about some mammoth dimension redolent with unbound peace and joy. 

‘This is paradise… a spiritual charging port for the willing person who is aware of this openness… beautiful… thanks a ton for sharing… I enjoyed watching these… So is it like charging the self, like we charge the batteries? But the batteries get discharged, so we get them plugged again for charging? So does your self also crave for charging after spending time in the city and hence you seek solitude again? It’s a lovely craving if it’s so…but how is it fundamentally different from other common cravings of the common people like me? Craving seems to be craving, even though it seems a holy one, but isn’t it still a need?

‘Do you expect to reach a stage where you feel the same serenity and peace which you feel in Zanskar in Hanoi itself? I mean an awareness when one is at peace even in outside chaos… like a steady lamp even among winds,’ my logical mind is full of questions.

‘Any mystical experience? I mean that would give some logical validation to the skeptics? Did you have any experience with entities and disembodied beings?’ my questions are endless.

The vacuum that she created in solitude is now spontaneously getting filled with explanatory words. This is very surprising because she has been very reserved during our interactions and hardly speaks during meetings, just silently listens to you. But now she has many words. 

‘Yes, I agree with you that true peace is when you are as comfortable in the middle of the market as you are in the mountains. Your emotions and awareness are not affected or get changed. But you also know that this is really difficult if you have not experienced true peace, and to achieve this you need to change your familiar living environment to clearly see how your mind and body work and how you recognize the entanglements from your mind. Being addicted to something cannot achieve true bliss. Sometimes you have to separate yourself from your familiar environment and experience different things.

‘I am not saying that living in the mountains will give you enlightenment or a super wisdom but I am saying that your experience with different living environments is important because only then you can separate yourself and observe how your mind works.

‘For me living alone in the mountains is not a challenge but a gift, I do not need to make any effort and when I return to the city I will have objective experiences when observing life in the city.

‘I want to experience contrasting ways of living so that I can observe how my mind works. That is my purpose when I withdraw from society and live fully with nature. Then I return to society and test myself.’

She is very clear about this lovely urge to merge with solitude on her solitary trail.

‘I can experience the mystical even when I live in the cities. It happens to me all the time, but living in the Himalayan environment and practicing silence there, it is always magical. I easily communicate with invisible beings and dakinis or angels. I can communicate with them mentally or I can see their manifestations through their transparent bodies. I can hear their music and smell their mystical scents. In short, I communicate with them as sentient beings with bodies. When I sing prayer songs in the mountains, sometimes they join me and sometimes I dance with them on the snow.

‘To others it may seem miraculous but to me it is normal communication. When you open your heart and immerse yourself in bliss you can easily feel the joy or suffering of all beings in other realms.

‘When you live in the mountains this is a great place for you to penetrate and communicate without words. This communication is completely different from verbal communication. You can easily understand every animal, every invisible being who wants to communicate with you and you can talk to them by opening your mind and heart to them. They will easily understand you.’

She expresses it beautifully. Yes, one’s experience is beyond words because words are fragments and are limited to our interpretation. But when we tell others, we are bound by words to convey what one has felt. But I have a questioning mind and I’m seeking answers on the plane where I have perceived things myself. She is talking of a different plane but she is graceful enough to try to make a bridge so that she can convey a portion of what she experienced there.

I’m trying to interpret her experience in my dimension, ‘You are right about the significance of exposing the self to different environments. It definitely enlarges the perspectives, gives additional dimensions of awareness and perception. So you mean basically it’s about exploring the mind, its ways, its patterns and impulsive structure. But can’t the mind mind its own business? The entire body is mind, each cell has memory and function and millions of spontaneous actions keep going without our conscious effort. So why should we mind the mind so much? Every thought, emotion, pattern, feeling, fluctuation is inherently part of the over-all cosmic pool of cosmic intelligence. So why should we just filter out a particular state to be better than the others, when mother existence is willing and ready to have the so-called worldly elements in its leela? You mean we mind the mind to that extent that we go beyond the patterns of impulsive thoughts and random changes in our feelings?

‘A very strong mind can manifest its beliefs. They say at the quantum level, there is no abstract reality without the observer. And the observed and the observer are interlinked. Tibetan Buddhism has concepts of dakinis and with conscious effort you manifest that reality. Maybe in that very pristine environment some Muslim or some tribal shaman from Africa or a Hindu devotee will manifest their deities and entities mentioned in their faith. Have you ever seen anything which is absolutely not related in shape or feeling to the dakinis mentioned in Tibetan Buddhism? Do they have strong likes and dislikes?

‘In India there is this story of Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Totapuri. It tells to what extent Ramakrishna had taken his faith. He had taken it to the extent of seeing mother Kali alive in the idol at the temple where he stayed. He worshipped mother Kali, a prominent Hindu deity. And he was stuck up with that beautiful mind construct, the image of Ma Kali. He needed to be convinced to stop manifesting this reality at the quantum level—the observed is always related to the observer. Swami Totapuri could feel that Ramakrishna is stuck up in the holy chains of his mind construct (attachment to the deity) and needs to be set free. Using the same mental construct, he guided Ramakrishna to behead that image. Mother wanted him to grow beyond Her image. To become mature, to grow into a highly spiritual man, a true son of the divine mother. Dense perception, dense concept, dense focus create a too solid image. It also somehow restricts one’s flow. In infinity there is no final limit. All remains to be known even despite knowing all.’

I have my counter logic inspired by what the quantum physicists say about the ultimate nature of reality.   

Logic is insatiable. No point was ever proved by the sword of logic. Ever. Because each and every logic has a counter logic. But sweet is the addiction to logic, the bane of modern man, so I’m still on my logical fusillade, ‘Those who know that they don’t know and can’t know all despite being seen to know very much, will say there is nothing miraculous. What we take as miraculous is a simple cause and effect in its own dimension, just that we don’t understand and feel it. In its own field, the apparent miracle stands like a normal existence of a flower in my domain of existence. So I very much believe in your lived reality. It’s a cosmic soup, infinitely layered with potential for self-manifestation of its self through various means, for example through a gentle, highly aware peaceful being. And that includes you as well. So I don’t have any doubt about it. Yes, I might have a vague feel of it myself—the words of the wordless, the language of silence. Everything manifests in the womb of nothingness. This is what I felt in Ladakh myself.

‘In moderate climate you have luxuriant manifestation of life forms. But there is emptiness and sheer sense of nothingness in harsh Ladakh climate. No tree, just stones, open skies, distances redolent with the possibility for the emptiness to unfold miles after miles. As you move towards Ladakh, you are moving from dense manmade manifestations in the cities to naturally produced forests in middle Himalayas to the lofty barrenness in high Himalayas… from collective pool of struggling frequencies, we are moving to more harmonized layers of energies. No wonder, we feel relaxed in open forests. Here, mother earth is responding to favorable weather elements, trees, meadows, grass. It’s more evolved type of manifestation than the cluttered cities, but it’s still manifestation… under the burden of being so… in trees you have the game of life, natural noise, romantic and poetic… but still there is some heaviness, simply because there is a struggle for survival in this manifestation.

‘In Ladakh, on the other hand, it is almost empty. It feels like we are moving from the manifest to the unmanifest in that pure, lucid stony high-altitude desert. One feels even more relaxed and peaceful… it’s beyond the game of manifestation… just open iciness… the open forces of nature, unbridled, untouched by competing frequencies… a still picture… the frozen moments of just being so… so near to the unmanifest on the roof of the world. There have been so many sadhus and sadhaks who could feel the joy of just being so.’

She knows the value of silence. A logical talk about what can only be conveyed through a wordless smile can only be met with silence—a nice, courteous full stop. She doesn’t reply.

I acknowledge it, ‘Your “silence” is the best answer to a “chatterbox” like me. Words can never give answers. Mere pointers they are. But yes, by being relaxed and at peace one adds to the beauty around. A peaceful mind is like a honey drop in this bitter world. Lighted be your path to peace and joy!’

Now she knows that laughter is the best answer in this situation, ‘Haa haa.’ I visualize her laughing; her lovely, narrow eyes closing with childish mirth. ‘Don’t worry, I’m just a little busy and I’ll reply to everything for a talkative person like you.’

A spiritual person can easily laugh off such minor irritants like talkative persons. I’m amused that silence here was work, ‘If you have the time to waste then most welcome because the more I speak and write, the more I know how irrelevant and illusionary all this is.’

I find typing too limited to carry on with such a profound discussion, so I propose why not we talk on the issue.

‘I really have difficulty listening and speaking after three years in silence and solitude, so please write to me what you want to say,’ she is comfortable with typing.

‘It has been a long time since I spoke and heard human voices. Yup, everything written and spoken is a product of the mind and being a product of the mind it is an illusionary thing.

‘When I write down my feelings to send to you and then I read them again, I still feel like I haven’t said anything, what I want to convey to you is still far away.

‘You asked me “but can’t the mind mind its own business? The entire body is mind, each cell has memory and function and millions of spontaneous actions keep going without our conscious effort.” Yes, the mind is not capable of doing that, because the nature of the mind is always fluctuating and uncertain. It cannot take care of the peace of each of us, but it is only an expert in creating fake problems and dragging us into them, so recognizing and observing the mind is extremely important for each practitioner.

‘The mind cannot be spontaneous, only emotions from our heart or from our body can be spontaneous.

‘The mind operates from our conditioning of knowledge and it habitually dominates all our perceptions and gives us the illusion that we perceive from our own spontaneity.

‘The intelligent universe is not present in the mind but in the cells that make up our body.

‘Buddhism has the concept that the mind is the greatest obstacle that every practitioner must face and recognize his mind and not identify himself with the mind. If we are not controlled by the mind, no practice will be needed and religion is unnecessary. As you know, in primitive societies when people were innocent and lived naturally with themselves and there were no laws to control people, religion was unnecessary.

‘It is very important that practitioners today are always interested in methods to recognize and control the mind because we have lost our innocence and we have overvalued knowledge over real life experience.

‘The masters have spoken a truth: outside of the mind there is no Buddha, god or devil. Our mind creates heaven and creates hell.

‘So if you are a Buddhist then the visualizations like dakinis will correspond to your Buddhist perception and if you are a Hindu then your mind will always have images or symbols of Krishna, Mahakali. There is no fixed or standard religious or demonic image, all images will appear corresponding to your mind.

‘There are so many religions in the world today because we have so many different types of minds.

‘You asked “have you ever seen anything which is absolutely not related in shape or feeling to dakinis mentioned in Tibetan Buddhism? Do they have strong likes and dislikes?”

‘This is impossible because you can only see them through your mind, if any form is outside your trained mind you cannot see it. So when I tell you that I communicate with invisible entities like dakinis, they all come from my Buddhist mind.

‘Now I’ve said it, any questions you have I will continue to answer until eternity.’

Words are the limited waves that temporarily surface on the ultimate sea of realization of the truth. She is very confident of creating more waves to make me feel the uselessness of wordy waves in getting profound answers. 

‘You have problem in talking and listening. I have mine of typing because I am typing on my laptop most of the time and feel saturated with typing. All of us have our comfort zones. But yes that’s how one feels when ego melts and one feels like a small medium for the expression of a few things,’ a person with theoretical knowledge of the experiential matters is a very irritating rival in a spiritual discussion. 

Since she has given me a free hand in wordy discussion by saying that she is willing to talk till eternity to answer my questions I carry on with my queries.

‘What exactly is the mind? The concept of mind itself is our creation and what we have created can’t be an entity in abstract from our biological operation. Mind is a very vague concept, a wonderful creation of our brain operation. To me mind is the entire body. And what matters is a balanced body functioning. This in turn will create a balanced output at the operational level and for convenience we can say it is to have a balanced mind,’ I ask the question and give my answer for the same.

She answers, ‘In my experience there is never a balanced mind, we can only have a balance between mind and body. Mind can never be the whole body. Mind is a big illusion of ours, it does not really exist, it is a creation of the karma accumulated from our body. Mind exists because body exists, when you lose this body the mind also disappears. Our whole world is created by mind, that is why the masters say that the world is Maya.’

The subject of mind has always been very significant for me, so my counter comes readily.

‘Whatever you have written about mind arises from an assumption of mind as an abstract entity, something having a separate dimension from the body. It isn’t. The concept of mind is merely a total summary for the way our biological systems operate in entirety. This extreme focus on mind is the root cause of all the problems. Why give it that much importance to erect an entire system of theology, religion and meditation practices? Why not accept one’s reality at the natural level without the concept of mind? An existence in totality, like the rest of the species.

‘First we create an entire mountain of the complexity of mind, give it a name, assign it a problematic domain and then we set out to cut it down. It’s very easy to live at ease, in totality, in the moment without giving too much attention to this concept of mind. I don’t look at myself as a mind struggling with the rest of me. It’s just me, pure me—my flesh, my energy, my thoughts, my feelings. I don’t segregate and first visualize a mammoth entity like mind that’s putting hurdles in my evolution or enlightenment. I see myself as something very normal, an animal like a cat or dog, weak in my areas and strong in some zones. Simple. And the more balanced is the body operation, one need not get haunted by the ghost of mind.

‘Sorry I don’t agree. There is no separate zone between mind and body. I accept them as one. Then one need not fight for balance.

‘You say “mind exists because body exists.” Yes this is what I mean. Mind is a human-devised concept to indicate the operational output of our biological systems.’

My kind and loving mediator friend now realizes the futility of words and also that one cannot answer till eternity to curious, argumentative people like me. I feel she is irritated a bit and feel sorry for triggering this unorthodox reaction in her.    

‘The difficulty is that you have never had an experience outside of your mind and you are talking to me from your mind, this will be very difficult for me to explain to you clearly,’ she is coming near to accepting the futility of taking about mind, the ways to dismantle it using the mind itself.

But the whirlpools of conceptual mind have taken me in. I’m rather fighting my own battle with the concept of mind, ‘Why create a false enemy first and then create a huge system of religion to defeat the enemy. To me there is no adversary mind to tame it and balance it with body. To me it’s merely a thought, a thought about mind, a mere output of my biological existence.

‘I have had my own experiences of the so-called mystical  things but I don’t overvalue these and leave them as something that’s not yet comprehensible to me at this stage. I think you too are merely talking from mind because you are just centered around the concept of mind’

She seems to mind the talk of no-mind through the concept of mind, ‘Yes, you said “is no adversary mind to tame it and balance it with body... to me it’s merely a thought.” So what are all your questions for? What are all those books you’ve written for?’

She has a point here. I try to revalidate my position, ‘Mind is a beautiful thought but still just creation of our operational system at the levels of body and energies. It’s very easy to say to someone that you have never experienced anything beyond mind but I can say the same to someone that you haven’t experienced God, so you won’t understand.’

‘Yes. This is the destination where we use our minds to talk to each other, when we use our minds to talk or argue we can only go to this destination,’ she seems resigned to the futility of discussion about the mind.

Nonetheless I clarify my point, ‘I’m not asking you questions to understand mind. I just asked about your experiences as a fellow seeker. It’s you who said you will talk through questions and answers format. I just wanted to ask about your experiences like I would ask another friend who went to Thailand and I would say how was it. Just that. I didn’t mean to experience more about the mind or God through questions. It was your interpretation. I am just about experiences. And all the books that I have written aren’t meant to seek some meaning of the ultimate truth. They are written as a form of wonder, curiosity, acceptance of this game of life, in its entirety… just an expression… without any purpose… simple. It feels good to be in wonderment and trying to express my small view about this endless game.

‘I flow with life. I am not erecting check dams of mind to tame it and divert the flow to take myself to divinity. I accept the present, the way it’s… in totality. And when I feel totality, there is no mind, no body… just being so. That’s why I don’t find them contradictory in nature to be battled out for balancing them. We have to fight to balance them because we ourselves have conceptually set them as adversarial entities. To me they are one and I don’t find myself wedged between body and mind. I just feel the way it’s, something that’s just me beyond body and mind bifurcation.’

A smilie from her side.

I fill in the blanks, ‘Joyful be your battle with mind. Let’s meet over coffee sometime in India. I will try to speak less. Do you read these days? Or just meditate?’

‘I took a break from reading and just meditated and watched birds and flowers. I think I will read again in six months,’ she says.

‘Vow that’s lovely! You have a very interesting way of managing your life. If I may ask, when was the last time you had an erotic dream? And what could have caused it? Extra energy born of food, or surroundings, or memories, or plain old habits of the mind?’ the stream of my questions hasn’t yet dried out, especially about this unsolved puzzle about sex and spirituality.

She is very honest and open about it, ‘This happens on my monthly periods. It doesn’t happen usually. It’s not regular but if it happens it’s usually on those days. And I think it happens because the old habits have not been fully purified and because a women’s body and mind are strongly influenced by the lunar cycles. This is a big obstacle for the women on the path of practice, but if you have full observation at the times when it happens, you can turn this obstacle into an opportunity to come out of it completely.’

I know a woman is best placed to talk about it but I take it still in flow with the previous discussion, ‘So we can accept it as a natural thing influenced by uncontrollable elements like lunar cycles which have a cause and effect on our biological systems, right?

She agrees, ‘Accept with observation and understanding. Accept with observation and awareness and grasp the cycles of its occurrence.’

But my doubts won’t stop barging in, ‘Why should it then be taken as an obstacle? Something so natural. Isn’t it like taking gravity as an obstacle because it is a hindrance in our urge to fly? Because we are evolved to walk? And if we nurture a pious end to fly, then even gravity is a hindrance! Should we then get into hard core tantrik mystical practices to levitate? Why can’t be just staying natural be pious? Why is it taken as an obstacle? Something so natural as walking under the force of gravity. I mean why can’t we be at ease and restful with what we are? Why try to be something different?’

‘It is only an obstacle if we do not observe and grasp it, but if we observe and understand it, it will be the door for us to transcend the physical. Your question is answered. Yes if you can be at peace with it, there will be no need for any question or any practice. If you can accept your whole body and mind as it is then you have come to ultimate enlightenment. Otherwise you have to search,’ she seems at a very stable frequency.

But mine is a speedy stream of questions and curiosities, ‘Why do we consider the physical urge to be a bondage? So as to transcend it. Why can’t we just accept the way we are? Just like a tree does. Is it the human destiny to try to be something else from what he is? Humans try to be scientists, artists, sports people, wealthy businessmen, politicians, stars. And just in the same flow, some of us try to be pious and holy and transcend the physical dimension. Isn’t it the same striving? To be something else.

‘I’m asking from your perspective, out of curiosity, because I hardly feel the requirement to know and be something else than what I am. It’s like just a child’s play to me. All this reading, writing, questioning are just in sync with what I already am; not something aimed at changing myself fundamentally.’

She takes a nice, cute, innocent jibe, ‘Yes, so you have attained the state of supreme enlightenment and I have not, so I have to search.’

I firmly deny this, ‘No. I don’t have the concept-bound mind regarding attaining supreme enlightenment. I just am. And while I search, seek, read, write, ask questions or give answers, all this is just like a child plays; for the sheer fun of it; not to become something extraordinary or supernatural. Ask a child why does he play? He doesn’t play to become something else; he just plays.

‘O my Tibetan friend, take me just as an argumentative Indian and meditate in peace. Joyful be your day!’

Then she used the best language befitting argumentative Indians. The language of silence. I believe she went into another long silent retreat. I just added to the noise around.