The Yo-yoing Empty Vessel

"Anything can happen anytime, it is best to be prepared." 

As I read the young Rahel and Estha's theorem to live life, a young me also internalized it as my life theorem. To the young, this was a good enough method to deal with situations. Making a bold placard of this, I pasted this on my bedside wall. I glanced at it everyday and lived analyzing every situation and breaking my head to 'be prepared' for 'anything'. It didn't work. Because in principle, one cannot be 'prepared' for 'anything'. Life threw millions of surprises. At each instance, I scattered in distress trying to figure out how to best deal with the next one. 

Eventually, I found shelter in spirituality - something I could hold onto that would not fail, that would not let me down, that would stand steady until the end. I read several theories and books and autobiographies by  wonderful spiritual explorers. Everyone harped on the same thing - the way to live was to 'drop' emotions, attachments, feelings, desires, everything. I succeeded only at a superficial level. When I dropped everything and left everyone behind and embarked on the most significant spiritual journey, like an empty vessel I - with all my questions -  resurfaced. There was still something left.  

To live with the flow

Cut to the new theorem - to live in the flow of life. To live as if this was the last chance to experience this, thisness. This very present that would pass by and then never come back again. To face everything that came my way because it needed to be dealt with, because it had come with its own blessings and curses. That this was the last chance to work out karma or relationships. Did that mean that I was living a life of a criminal just doing my time for my crimes over years and lifetimes? What if time wasn't linear and I could live the same present again and again like Sisyphus, be stuck with this burden? Oh, the exhaustion! There didn't seem to be any joy in the arriving, even if one day I did.  

Did it then depend on me to make space for joy or laughter? That didn't seem right. Nature was built on both - destruction and joy. The flowers blooming and wilting, the sun casting different shades on the sky at sunset and sunrise, the earth creating wondrous landscapes from every destruction. It all seemed like a flow, a cycle, of moving from one extreme to another. Like a river changing its course and deciding its path of whether to traverse a rocky mountain or flow through the porous fields, the destination always kept changing. Nature was built upon this polarity of destruction and beauty simultaneously. I didn't need to 'make space' for the other which naturally exists. Was the flow a new theorem? The thing with theorems was that they were required because an ideal answer is already in the mind at the outset. Here, the truth was that there was no ideal answer, no absolute, no solidity.  

Death and Polarities

Recently, I witnessed a death of someone I knew. It was overwhelming to witness as the loving attachments wrench at the close family's hearts; to experience the blessed moment as the soul, after leaving the body, gained access to the infinite, to the god, to the creator, to the universe in its entirety. Like a drop of water that carried the essence of the ocean. This beauty along with the decay of the lifeless, soulless body that lay limp - mouth open, eyes shut, organs resting to a slow hum. Soon, the body, the vehicle that carried someone through life will be burnt. The moment was beautiful and gross at once. 

Even in death there was this polarity of the living. Life can be 'experienced' only through the body - to see, to hear, to touch, to feel, to sense. Stop to think for a moment of the wonder of feeling the breeze on the skin, the air, the cold, the warmth, the heat. The feeling of water on the skin, the colours that are unique to every eye that sees them, the mauves, the peaches, the lavender is unique to every eye that experiences it. And we are here in all our own uniqueness, to experience and live only as we can. If this had to explained, would it do justice to the reality? It is easy to get lost in this side and live as if we will never die and to be taken by surprise when at some point the body stops functioning, and this experience lost. 

The end

How to stop yo-yoing between these polarities - of life and death, of feeling and knowing, of standing and flowing, of breaking and becoming? When one finds oneself in the living, one identifies with it. When one sees a side, one tries to become that. Then when the other is seen, to become that. And this constant swinging between two ends of the pendulum continues. The same is true with feeling and knowledge, bhakti and Dnyan, being rooted and flowing. Is only one answer required at a time? Why is the need to choose a side and say that one 'believes' in it? Why the urgency to discard all the other answers, which may have some truth, but have to be discarded because there is always a chosen one? Is this deep need for a solution a societal brainwashing? The education, the economics? What is the right way then? 

When the pendulum stops moving, it just does that - stops. Maybe stopping is not the way. There could be another way, away from the motion of the pendulum, away from the ruling of the clock, or time. Like holding the right and the left to walk in a balanced manner. The right and the left leg are both needed to move forward, which also provide the balance to stand and use either side when required. Perhaps the rightway could be the same - to hold both together, living with the consciousness of death, drowning in faith by being aware of the knowledge, standing still with the possibility of movement. Holding the possibility of the other in living each moment. Like when you dip your feet in the flowing stream, the water is never same, neither are you, and neither is the stream. 

Is that possible? If so, how to bring it into consciousness remains to be seen. Or perhaps this just a fantasy of the mind to again find out a 'right' way. A theorem?