And here I am again. Like the proverbial penny. Or the prodigal returning home? The reader can judge. After having been away for so long, I am here again after some persuasion from S, who, I suspect, hopes for some revelatory thoughts, or some enlightenment that I would presumably have had access to, during the pandemic isolation.
Alas, I have had no moment of revelation to proclaim myself a guru, or at least an enlightened student of life. I have only learnt to come to terms with whatever is, and realise that change is what happens with the passage of time. Things change, people change, and ergo, life changes. (The virus taught us that with its mutations.) Ha!
Change does not always lead to happiness, or more happiness. But acceptance at least brings peace and we may even come to realise that we do not want anything so much that we cannot forgo it. We teach ourselves to desire, so it should be possible to also to learn not to desire. But this is really very difficult to cultivate, so to begin with, it may be easier to learn to accept life as it is. Here the one thing I seem to keep harping on — gratitude — can be useful. Where we are grateful, we find it easier to accept.
To accept and to be receptive – that may be what I have learnt in the last four years. It makes my emotions less turbulent, and helps me feel more detached from the moment. Isn’t this what growing older (and wiser) is about?
There I see it, a vaguely discernible path ahead. I am seeking the road like millions before me have, and very few have found. I wonder if this is quite what S expected me to write, but these are the thoughts that occurred to me today.
You’re back, yay!
So we’ve been practising mindfulness meditation (aka Vipassana meditation), which is the practice of paying close attention to and accepting every sensation that arises in consciousness, including every sensory feeling, thought and emotion. The idea then is not to be of free of desire but to notice the feeling of desire itself in a non-judgmental way and simply accept it, with an ostensibly paradoxical goal of experiencing the world intensely but without the sense of “I” or subjective self being integral to that experience. In other words, the desire to eliminate desire itself is a desire, and the only real option is to eliminate the concept of desire, which is to say eliminate subject-object duality.