Ocean of life

“Out beyond ideas and wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Rumi.

“Have you ever died?” ask James, an Indiana Jones crosses Mad Max Australian biker.
“A couple times” I reply getting flash backs to my California days.
“What I learned when I died is that when you find something you love, you should never let it go. It’s the most important thing you have, is what you love.”
“Maybe” I mumble after a sip of my beer, King Fisher. Not in the mood to have a deep talk, I get him back on his bike talk. We chat about bikes for a few beers in the stoned humming of the place.

Question: “How is one to begin to see what is?”

Answer: “ By not beginning, by giving up the idea of a beginning.”

A bar, night time, Chapora, Goa, India.
The place is filled with roughed up looking hippies and the usual international freaks. Ageless pirates navigating time-space, carrying turtles on their backs and wild wisdom in their eyes. One day, they forgot to take the plane back to wherever they came from, now they’re just here, wherever here might be. This could be many places around the world, this happens to be India. A couple stands up and shakes a bit to the psy trance sounds coming from the speakers, until a plate of food is put in front of them for which they sit back down to eat their thali.

Beers pass, chillums pass, everything passes.

Goa passes. Left over from the doped up, scabbed up dirty hippies of the 60’s in search of new freedom, a few juice shops and holy sites survive in the memory of ancient travelers. The trance parties which made Goa famous amongst the party goers of the world has been replaced by a law shutting down music at 10 pm. By 11 the music turns down or stops, by 12 it’s getting late. Of course, if you happen to be a hard chore party monster, there is always something happening, somewhere, always. The kids get dread locks in a pack, feel like free spirits for a day, packaged tourists shop for stuff, until they each go back to wherever they come from.

Skin and bones cats with hungry eyes miaowl for a piece of the evening maquerel thali, fluffy the dog with a glassy eye fluffs around, Durga the cow gets her morning melon, Brutus the bull bulches around the kitchen until he gets a buket of water thrown at him, pigs grunt rummaging through garbage. It’s a slice of Goa.

“How do you understand God?” asks Paul, a Canadian-Italian reiki teacher, traveling Asia for the last couple years.

“Um.” I reply after a moment of looking at nowhere. “First, I’d say it’s a word, then I’d wander what the word evokes in me. To some the word points to a creator being, to others we can not say anything about it. I go along the ones that think that the word points to Life, the Universe and everything. There is a whole lot of God everywhere really” I say as I tap the table, lift up a glass, and points to an ashtray “ So, my relationship with God is my relationship with life. It fluctuates and changes every day as with any relationship really. Sometimes I am very happy with it, sometimes I get angry at it, sometimes I love it more than other times, other times all I can think about is it, and others just forget about it. Yet, no matter what I do, I am always living it. It’s like the ultimate love story really. Ideally I’d like to get a more stable relationship with it. But generally speaking, I have an OK relationship with it. It’s been a great trip so far.” I pause for a moment.

Paul and Dave look into nowhere.

“The closest thing to it is silence” says Dave as Paul and I nod in agreement.
“Actually even this is a form of romantism, another duality thinking. Sound is also a property of silence.”

We all look into a nowhere filled with taxis, cars, pushers and other peddlers, fire dances and cocktail nights.

Together bathing in our own silence while Yoda feeds Durga. Hare hare.

“Coconut, coconut, goooooddd”
“No, Sonu.”
“Coconut, gooooodddddd.”

Sonu echoes along the other vendors on the beach. One after the other they pass by, arms loaded with sarongs, baskets of fruits on their heads, jewelry, cd’s and other trinkets which I have no use for.
“No, no no no” slowly leaves room to the silence of the ocean.
“How is your love life going?” I ask Paul another morning.
“Non existent” he replies, “ I’ve been busy doing my thing, that doesn’t live much space for anything else.”
“You, David?” I ask looking towards him.
“A disaster” he answers in his typical british smirk. “You?” he asks in my direction.
“Oh, I don’t know. I am so confused about emotions, I don’t know what I feel any longer. I don’t know what to do with them anymore. None of them last anyhows, so better sit back and watch them pass, or?”
“Oh, she’s been hurt” laughs Paul.
“They almost seem like a waste of time after a point.” I add to my reflections.
“Oh what is not a waste of time?” blurts Dean. “If you don’t waste your time with emotions, you could just sit and smoke cigarettes. Dean is a big and buffed Australian, sharing his time between India and Bulgaria. Dean gives reiki session by the shuffle, shuffling bowlshit out of people.
“ I don’t know really.” I mumble, “maybe I’ll just give up on the whole game”.
“That’s what I did” opens Yoda, a Krishna devotee since she was 16. Yoda is now in her late 40’s, singing songs for Khrishna, feeding cows and giving massages. “Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, rama rama” she sings in the crowded bus, on the way to Mapusa, counting the beads in her rosary bag strapped on her shoulder.

“Pineapple good, pineapple, goooooddd”

“No, Sonu.”

“Pineapple, gooooodddddd.”

Morning dolphins cross the bay jumping in and out of the water. The day is spent in a cocoon of friends, work, and various activities. We cook food and share colorful meals, we blow smoke, we speak of nothing and life and all. Sharing music from home, sitting in our temporal living room. Those are happy and careless times.

At night, the village is taken over by druming, sounds from bars and restaurants. When I finally get back to my room in the evening, I sit in a flying carpet, floating in the many sounds of the guest house.

All is one distorted and cacophonic silence. All I feel is Now caressing the golden skin on my body. I am somewhere on the beach, under coconut trees. The clothes, the food, the people, the smells and the sounds remind me that I am in India.

Books pass through my hands, memories play theatre in my head, I watch it all from afar. Passing and transient mind games. I watch them all pass.

“That which can think of the other, the projection is Mind. Mind can not exist without emotion. Emotion are not a requirement for survival. They are a game we developed that went wrong at some point, it went sour.”

I see a glass of water overflowing into an ocean. The glass disappears into the ocean. I am that glass, the emotions that filled the glass have now gone back to their source, an ocean of sorrow, happiness, joy, sadness and all the ranges of emotions felt by sentient creatures. I am that ocean.

Writers write about paradigm shifts, they write of a better and golden age, of heavenly realms and other such wanders. The Krishnas in all their full blown egos tell me about Ages to come, it’s written in the books, they say with a glitter of excitement and self satisfaction in the eyes. Everyone uses such pretty words to describe the places where we can go, if only we were good enough, if only we followed a few and basic rules. The Krishnas make me think of dope head ranting about their loss of ego, their merging with the cosmos, yet, remaining just as confused as anybody else around. Khrishna, dope, same thing but different, I think.

“We see that looking for beauty and philosophical meaning to life is merely a way of justifying ourselves, saying that things are not as bad as we think. Things are as bad as we think. Form is form, emptiness is emptiness, things are just what they are and we do not have to try to see them in the light of some sort of profundity. Finally, we have come down to earth, we see things as they are.”

Flying on my magic carpet, waves and bird songs. There is nothing to reach for any more, I don’t see any better time coming, for the simple reason that it’s already right here and right now. Not a thought, not a worry disturbing the Mind, same lunch and same dinner days after days. Dewali (Indian new year), St Xavier’s feast, holy food, all passes.

“If you neglect to protect your Mind, you can neither close the door to suffering nor open the door to happiness.”

“Papaya good, papaya, goooooddd”

“No, Sonu.”

“Papaya, gooooodddddd.”

“What if I don’t feel anything anymore?” I look at the thought pass my Mind. “What would it be bad really? After all, once I have experienced enough realms of emotional states, they become like mere data. I can look at them, observe them, play with them, experiment with them, but really….what to do with them?”
“I don’t know, I am not ready” people like to say. No one is ready I think, no one knows anything. We just do the best we can with what we got, really it’s all we can do.
I understand part of the beauty of arranged marriages.

“Look my shop, look my shop Madame.”
“10 rupees, 10 rupees” asks the little girls in the bamboo shops.

“We have to be brave enough to actually encounter our emotions, work with them in a real sense, feel their texture, the real quality of the emotions as they are. We would discover that emotions actually does not exist as it appears, but it contains much wisdom and open space.”

“Have you made a decision yet?”
“I don’t know” I reply giving the latest news about the matter. Choeyang wants to marry me, but what do I know about love? My last 2 relationships also whispered the same romantic words that we all secretly want to hear. Marriage was a plan, kids were a plan, life as 2 was a plan. In the end, even that passed, leaving only memories of pipe dreams for the theatre of my Mind. People talk and say things, it doesn’t mean much really. Let it go. “Every moment is new, every situation different.” Echos my Mind.
“I don’t know” is all I am sure of. “ I don’t know”, the very sentence which got me angry and sad a few monthes ago. A few words that made me decide to stay in India for a while. “I don’t know”, words which I called cowardly, weak. “I don’t know” have become some of my favorite words for now.
“It’s better if you don’t come here now. Maybe I’ll come to you laters.” I say to Choeyang on the phone.
“It’s better like that” he says in all his quiet and beautiful strenght. This little silent man understands more in all his silence than most in all their words. He shows me another way than anger to deal with the “ I don’t know”, he shows me infinite patience.
“Yes, it is better for now.”
I do exactly what I thought I disliked in others. Instant karma. I am being selfish, for once, becoming what I was putting down just yesterday. I told myself I’d come to Goa for a time to myself, and that’s exactly what I am doing, I am enjoying myself Goa style.

I don’t know, the future is open.

Dave left this morning, for his next stop. A couple of Scandinavian looking blonds from Aarhus, Denmark, come to replace him. The theatre in my Mind plays on, there is no escape from it, just let it go, the movies change faces.
Dave goes back to Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadul state. Back to the Silent Mother for guru season, back to the second most important embodiement of Shiva after Mount Kalaish.
We’re all life long travelers having spent most of our time out of our birth country. Not really from anywhere anylonger, at home everywhere. We come and go with meditations on the transient nature of things. Bonds between travelers appear out of nowhere, strong and short, just like a trip. A beautiful moment has passed, a sweet memory was born to remember.

“I have to decide what I am doing after my visa expires” I say at the morning table. “Go back to Europe, and be done with my India trip, or stay in Asia a bit longer and see what happens.”
“Europe is calling you?” asks Paul.
“Not really. I have my family there and that’s important to me. They understand that I am doing my life though.” I pause for a moment listening to the other conversation going around the table.
“Actually, if I really think about it, nothing is calling me, nowhere is calling me. I’d love to get a call actually, that’d make things a bit clearer.” I finish looking at Paul who approves shaking his hand. He knows exactly what I mean. No call anywhere, an ocean to swim in. Most of us only think we want freedom, few of us can really handle it on a daily basis.

"Abandon the idea of fundamental building blocks of matter, accept no fundamental entities whatsoever, no fundamental constants, laws or equations. The Universe is then seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events, they all follow the properties of the other parts and the overall consistency of their interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.” Boostrap theory by Geoffrey Chew.

Yoda looks at my hand lines. “Oh yeah” she goes on, “your intellect line will be crossing your heart line in the next 3 or 4 months. After that you’ll surrender and see everything in a clear light. The veil will unlift for you, and then you can really live off your karma bank, because you got tons of good stuff in there from the work you have done before. Just as your chart says, you’re a true devotee.” “Ahahhaha, when I really surrender, I’ll have nothing left to say, because really, there is nothing to say, there is just doing it and dealing with whatever we do. The theories and other such concepts are mere entertainment, mind masturbations really. Ego search and doubts. For now, I still sometimes enjoy induldging in wandering and trying to word out what is this thing called life.”
“Good, things should not be on blind faith. You have to test out your beliefs for yourself. It’s necessary.”

Yoda also see 2 kids in my hand lines. My chart was done by Mahajastra, another Khrishna, a 60’s psychedelic british musician in his previous life. In this life, he is a vedic astrologer, a one man’s band creator of worlds.

“Your chart is a devotees guru chart, it’s a very powerful and spiritual chart, you have healing potentials, you’ll find your guru next year. You’re someone who has the potential to be satisfied. Your home environement is very important to you.” he says, “marriage next year.” As he goes on explaining to me about Houses and planets in the vedic astrology, from which the western astrology derived after many simplifications.
I take this into account as I’d take in any other system of divination, with a big spoon of salt. Everybody knows a little something about something.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I think to myself.
Not knowing and being at peace with this state of transiency, I let it go. I swim in the ocean of life. After all, any plans I have done in life never worked out as planned, so why worry about anything? A year ago I haden’t really planned to come to India, and here I have been sitting in India since May. Celebrating my 35 birthday in Goa amongst good friends.
Maybe, I’ll get married and have kids, maybe not, maybe I’ll find a teacher, maybe I’ll teach, maybe I’ll write the book in my chart, maybe I’ll do more travels, maybe.

I don’t know is all I know, and I feel it’s already quite a lot.

“So, in order to follow the spiritual path one must first overcome the initial excitement, that is one of the first essentials. For unless one is able to overcome the excitement, one will not be able to learn, because any form of excitement has a building effect. One fails to see life as it is because one tends so much to build up one’s own version of it.”

Thanks to my family and all the people I meet in the ocean of life, the kind and mad souls I encounter who keep on making this life the amazing trip it is. All you beautiful people, along with the amazing planet we inhabit make this trip all worth while, may all your whishes come true.

Pictures of latest paintings and friends.

Quotes from The Myth of Freedom, by Chogyam Trungpa unless specified other wise.