Wednesday 1 September 2010

staying connected

can we stay connected
vertically and horizontally
in time and space?
knowing one another's pulse
and the pulsebeats of everyone gone
and everyone hence to evolve?

then is immortality!

*****

13 comments:

Balachandran V said...

Which way vertical, which way horizontal, in space? Time is a figment of man's imagination, part of his effort to arrange and understand his existence, isn't it? And immortality - it is the opposite of mortality, the one truth of life, the one truth we humans try to evade...

kochuthresiamma p .j said...

i guess we are connected. the collective unconscious is a time defying space, isn't it?

P. Venugopal said...

we are connected. some time ago one of our friends on the blog wrote a poem on watching the moon. by a strange coincidence i too was doing the same thing that night. i have a copy of Basho's haikus in my library. i took it out and zeroed in on a piece in which Basho writes of watching the moon. it was a full moon night and Basho was on a long journey, far away from home. "the moon should now be shining on the leaves of the banana tree in the front yard of my home," he was thinking.

that must have been 500 years ago. the same moon! can you imagine?connected vertically and horizontally in time and space!

and when we think of the same moon shining on our grandchildren long after we are gone, what do we feel? immortality!!! eureka!!!!!

Balachandran V said...

The sense of euphoria is fine, Venu. I too have felt this connectedness many times, that sense of bliss... Yet, like JK would have said, 'Shall we look at it together?'.

Immortality is something we wish for , knowing only too well our mortality. There is no point in resisting it, accept it as joyfully as an evening breeze.... What would it matter if we are immortal, after our death?

My old died lying on my lap - accepting water from me and then a little yelp - he was gone.

That is all there is to it. But of course, we can imagine, we can hallucinate, we can wish, for immortality.

P. Venugopal said...

we shall look at it together without taking positions, without either believing or not believing in immortality.
"My self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence...I am the self that abides within all beings." (Gita IX. 5; X. 20).
This may be a thing of hullucination or otherwise, we don't know. Look at it also without taking a position.
There have been moments, as you also say, when you have felt it. In Bible, there is something about Jesus feeling on his back the sting of the whiplashes on another person's back. When one stays connected, with the veil of separateness gone, that is also a possibility.
What divides us actually? We all have the same spark of consciousness in us, don't we? We are also made of the same elements. But our temporal feelings of the self separates us. There is a specific period during which the matter that makes us, several elements of the earth and the air in a particular combination joined together, is inhabited by an unseeable thing we broadly describe by the term consciousness. What is this? Is it Venu or Balan? It is neither. It is something common to everything that exists, had existed and would exist...
This is never true until we give the idea a chance and live in it and meditate on it and do not block it from the restrictive position of our self.

Balachandran V said...

Venu, point taken. But please note I said nothing about connectivity; instead, I focussed on 'immortality'.


Again, in the moments I said I have felt the connection - the actual feeling was a sense of liberation from time, life, death and my own self - it was like being in space without dimensions, a sense of oneness with everything else, a blending with the cosmos.
Here the feeling is not of connection - to connect would be to connote there are distinct entities - what happened is the loss of entity of my self and casting away into the infinite... A sense of non-duality...

Such moments occur not only when I am in the mountains, but when I read something I like, when I look at someone I like...

Of course, as JK would've said, it is just a memory of an experience that I am recounting, never can the experience and its memory be the same thing..

I do not care to quote much, but I suggest you read ( perhaps you already have) 'Nirvana shatakam' of Sankaracharyar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_Shatkam

The Nirvana shatakam kind of sums up things...

One more thing: I am not 'taking a position'; I am merely offering another perspective - and I am always amenable to be convinced otherwise... But, if you would rather I didn't offer any, no offence taken! :)

P. Venugopal said...

oh, Balan, this comment is a superb one. I am Shiva, I am Shiva, of nature knowledge and bliss. Sheer bliss going boom into the void!
We are both speaking about the same thing. Expressing is the difficult part. We have all experienced it on different occasions in our life. But how do we express that which is wordless? Where is the offence, Balan. Offence comes only when the wordless is put into word, the distortion happens. On both sides we perceive differently from what we mean. We don't stay connected :)
I haven't before read Adi Sankara. Each word needs to be meditated over and over and still we will not touch the point beyond point where its meaning spreads for Adi Sankara.
(Now just watch how our mind works. If I were you, I would search for something offensive in this entry!!! when actually we love each other. :)

Prabhakar said...

Venu and Balan,
Since JK was mentioned I thought I could point out to you his reference to time as a stream of which we are a part. He says unless we dissolve this 'me' which achieves, is fulfilled and runs after the more, it will be reborn!
The common understanding of immortality is the desire to perpetuate this 'me' as the rich man, author, do-gooder. I understand what Venu says. In a sudden moment of insight we realise our ancestors have romanced this moon. Biologists have determined that humans are descended from the same African mother. To dig deep into the earth is to travel back in time. Immortality is already there but not the way we want it.

P. Venugopal said...

immortality is something i deeply feel. i feel contemporaries with the Buddha and Attila the Hun. And also all the Buddhas and Hitlers yet to be born. i take out my grandchild in my hands on a round down the lane to the side of a large public pond we have near my home. each morning it is a routine nowadays. she is in my arms but i vanish. i move according to her impulse. she lunges after a butterfly and i go in that direction. she pauses to look at a crow and i stop there. she watches the kingfisher flash down from the electric post into the pond making a splash in the water and flash away with or without a fish on its beaks back to the electric post and she is surprised but expressionless. she is seeing everything for the first time. she is looking at all these things without giving them a name. this thing around us is going on, has been going on and will go on. if you put your mind at the right position, in a mindless condition, you can sense an overall solidity to the whole thing. the past, present and everything yet to come merging into one whole thing in which you are there, all your forefathers who had ever breathed are there and so also all your grandchildren yet to come. this solid unity does not limit itself to your narrow line of descendence. it spreads to all species, all elements, all forces of nature, all thought, everything.

Sorcerer said...

Immortality!!
Many spend their life-time in quest for achieving the immortality failing to understand the life in itself is immortal and we are part of the whole...the universe.
:)

P. Venugopal said...

Sorcy, you know it. You are where the thing is. As flexible as flexibility is. Going with the wind, flowing with the flow, riding the waves and living every moment of it. Two hoots about immortality!!!

Sumi Mathai said...

hoooo the comments got me scared :) im tryng to think of an intelligent sentence to write down and i ain't getting any. turned dumb i guess :)

P. Venugopal said...

welcome back, Sumi. you were slightly downcast for some time, weren't you?