There and back again

I awoke at 10 am on Wednesday 28th March, all ready to travel to India in just a few hours time. Strangely, I wasn't at all excited. And I wasn't sad either. Just a single voice floated within my sleep-charged mind. It said, "There is nowhere to go."

Great!

I did, however, go to India. And I was, of course, confronted with lots of interesting scenes, things and people. But they all appeared to me as a mirror; ultimately I was confronted with myself. As the Little Prince has said, in the book by the same name, "straight ahead of oneself, one cannot go very far." My journey was not to "India," but to myself. And yet, ironically, this inward searching is the true heritage and spiritual meaning of India.

India, and in indeed the whole of the East, has a rich treasure of what we in the West might best understand as no-mind. West is mind: technology, science, mathematics, insurance, and lots of words. Such a mind has of course been extremely helpful and has made many Westerners materially comfortable and feeling somewhat fulfilled. But the cost has been that, for many Westerners, their world has become contingent, like a thin shell that needs constant patching up with consolations and reassurances. Mind is an impressive, even beautiful, structure, but on its own it is a very poor, even poisonous, form of life. So in the West, mind has been both our blessing and our curse. The East, on the other hand, has more reality on the inside: I was aware of a deep and solid peace and well-being in many Indians I encountered. However, as with some others, I found that this could be rather exposed and poorly equipped to deal with outer, material realities. Subsequently, the Eastern society, to our Western mind, looks crazy; everything is chaotic, nothing is organised. The roads, for example, are crazy; if you drive in India, you have to be totally involved and engaged in the activity in order to stay alive. But they are alive! I know that here, in Northern Ireland, you need not be engaged while driving; you can choose to be anywhere else, because, to drive on our roads, all that is required is a machine-like conformity to the highway code - then just keeping your eyes open is enough. You need not be that alive; just a little consciousness is needed. But really we are all sleeping. When 7 months ago I changed from driving a car to driving a scooter, I realised how that all along I was fast asleep, dreaming in my cosy little car, detached from the world.

Just like being on my scooter, India was a little trip out of my normal, sleepy life. A reality check!

About half of the time in India I was in a meditation resort, Osho Commune International (see osho.com). It is a great place to relax, rediscover yourself, and to meet lots of interesting people from around the world. At least that’s how it was for me. Maybe I will write about some of the meditation techniques they do there in a later blog.

About half way through my trip, while in the resort, due to some high-voltage joking with a friend, I was in a rare moment of no-mind (i.e. not being serious). The very next moment I caught the eye of a beautiful girl, whom, without a moment's hesitation, I suddenly engaged with the most random question, so random, in fact, that I can’t even remember what the question was. After trying to compose herself from this sudden intrusion of her personal space, gradually she began to warm to me. We connected, or at least our energies did. But deep down, down below my warm outward display of charm, I was cold. And coldly calculating... But after trying to calculate whether she was as calculating as me, slowly I realised I was trusting her, and that it wasn't so bad, even though she still felt slightly dangerous.

Oh, and I got a new name: Yoko. It's Japaneese and aparently means "child of light"