A musing monkey and a meditating 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 calmer 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 gleeful monkey is, somewhere and somehow, the cause (as well as the 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 the strict mould of a particular ideology, belief system or sect. In my opinion, being cast in a particular belief system sets up a kind of 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 at the same moment.

There should be absolutely no problem if you feel comfortable in a solitudinal space, which you work out for yourself with single-minded focus, ironclad determination and steely willpower. So my dear monks, hats off to you!

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 slightly different paths of two seekers on their own journeys. Two waves crashing into each other playfully before moving on to take many other forms in the lap of Father Sea.