Out of Jail

I ask myself why I don’t write here more often. Since January 2008, I’ve wanted to post something daily. What prevents? The biggest obstacle is some self-imposed rules, very constraining ones, so that however much I scribble, little emerges to see the light of day. The most important rule is to write from some kind of compelling intensity, preferably an exaltation. Anything less doesn’t seem sufficiently true. I carefully chose the word “exaltation” so as to avoid “bliss”, a word from my guru-infested past, reeking with the perfume of Indian joss-sticks. Back then, the greeting was Jai Satchitanand! which meant “Hail Truth-Consciousness-Bliss”. It takes some courage to admit this stuff.

My animal-nature, I now realize, is the core of my reality, and I’ve always reacted strongly to smell. Whatever people call “spirituality”, I find it in the point where I, with my separate body and private consciousness, make sensual contact with the physical Universe of which I am a part. It sounds as though I am at the mercy of context, i.e. environment, and in a way it’s true: I am a slave to physical circumstance. And yet there is something more, that softens the blows and provides continuity. That mysterious something must be what people call God.

The reek of joss-sticks and unchallenged certainties of the Sanskrit saints are in my past (may they rest there in peace!). Give me the tang of recently-applied gloss paint, especially when with the skill of my own hand I have applied it to my own bathroom window-frame. This paint flows as obligingly from the brush, when you know how to handle it, as the ink from this fountain-pen, before the words are typed and edited to appear on the screen of anyone in the world who’s wired up to receive them.

This blogging is an analog of that sensual contact of lone individual with the common Universe. It’s a grim image though, souls all over the world hunched before computer screens. For thirty years I spent an hour cross-legged each day, with my doors of sense closed to the world and focused inwards, in search of mythical enlightenment. That too was grim, a Robben Island of the soul, a womb which I joyfully renounce as soon as reborn.

So it’s the gloss paint, the humdrum task, which occupies my days, even though I would often prefer the flow of ink from a pen to the flow of pungent paint from a brush. But writing requires exaltation, and that’s a form of Grace. You cannot grab it, only wait till it’s given. It just happens, as on midsummer evening when I went wayfaring towards the sunset. There I felt the sacred interface between my soul’s existence and the Universe’s, as I climbed a hill from whose summit I saw nothing but fresh greenness: cornfields, woodland trees, mown meadows, all glowing in the low sun where flies danced in the clearings and rabbits raced for cover.

The following morning I put on a dark suit and striped tie, to play consultant for a day, which turned out to be nine hours without a break, just sandwiches and coffee delivered to the desk. It was like the Count of Monte Cristo suddenly waking up in a cell of the Château D’If. In odd moments, I found myself looking at the potted plants, none of which were in the peak of health, and addressing them thus: “You stuck here too? How do you survive at all?”

But the most shocking thing was to realize that for decades, sustained by that hour-long cross-legged ritual, I had thought all this was normal.