Time

And I watched and watched

as the world passed by

and yet didn’t learn.

For it is the depth, not the breadth of experience

that makes truth available.

Another observation that came from reading a meditation book was that learning will keep coming, I don’t have to feel awful about what I didn’t know earlier :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It is one of those days when I feel something that points out a larger emptiness. I feel it is because I feel more ‘connected’ to the outer sphere and inner reality, to emptiness itself—anatta. Have been spending hours meditating, had three consecutive holidays and had little else to do. It is still notional though, yet to come as literal experience.

Also, strangely enough my understanding of things have changed without warning. Love is not about receiving any more, but giving. Love is not passion, not in the least bit, but loving-kindness for all. Quite humbling.

Aspirations are linear and not splintered into a thousand mirages. Yet I have come at odds with common notions that take pride in creating a dependency in love. I have to saddeningly cover the grand liberating gifts of dhamma under the shroud of phrases like ‘I am austere’. There is bounty of satisfaction within and that’s reducing my sensory intake of food, pleasant odors, music etc., not any favoritism for a notion of austerity. Sometimes, one meal a day suffices. Fulfilling, but strange for peers who count my rotis. I have seen these phases of little eating come and go, yet to discover why.

May dhamma spread!

Rock said

A rock was buried in the bed of a river. With seasons the river changed color. During rains it will be muddy, in summers it will be green with algae and in dark winters when the nearby textile factory is active and there's little water, it looks like a little nullah. The rock, with the little awareness it had, looked around at the changing scenario, constantly flowing, changing colors, odor and hue. The rock felt it was travelling, changing. All the cycles never displaced the rock.

Sometimes, everything around us seems to be changing, and we take it as automatically affecting us. We are not what we react as, never are, for it is a flux. Reactions will come and go like fluids in the river, anger, passion, peace and becoming. This kind of change is not growth, its no-travel. One has to look at internal change, the breath, to understand the internal and the external, to understand if there is a change/progression at all?!

Joy

‘Cutivating joy' is more about ‘cognition’.

Even when there is anger, impatience, dissatisfaction, some part of me still seeks joy, and finds it.

Joy is independent of ‘pleasure.’ The difference has taken years to trickle down. Joy is a deeper state of mind than pleasure; it is more of a ‘disposition’.

One cant expect to feel joy after killing/stealing/sexual misconduct/intoxication. Such a person, one would say, is not in a state of joy. Joy is bereft of anguish, greed, hatred, or vengeance.

A stainless mind, a fearless mind, a free mind, is joy.

Cultivating joy

It was easy to swap joy for pleasure. Driving back from college with a friend, my favourite song on the radio, I thought to myself- Is this not pleasure? Well, it was an inconstant pleasure, something that wouldn’t last if we were to keep driving and listening to the song for 2 hours, ten hours … there will be a time when it would satiate me and a new desire would come. I’ll need food and that will be pleasure, then sleep, then this, that …endless like a trap! ‘Pleasure’ is certainly not joy, if I look back and answer my own question today. Also, by refuting pleasure as joy, I have more or less sought something deeper at work than a window in time, a meal, a day or a decade of consumerist existence.

To know right direction from wrong is to know joyful states from ones that bring suffering. Craving and aversion bring suffering; equanimity and awareness bring freedom, liberation. One starts appreciating this by experience, and develops morality, calm, compassion, and mindfulness- states akin to ‘joy’.

With constant mindfulness there is a more vigorous feeling of joy, an undercurrent, a more permanent one.