Beyond the To and Fro

Living now in Dubai, I am still having to travel to South Africa quite frequently.

Backwards and forwards, to and fro, seems to be a persistent theme in my life this year.

Airports are becoming my friends and I look upon them as in-between-places, bardos as it were between different worlds, different lifestyles, different cultures and different perspectives.  I now view them as teachers and attempt to soak in what they have to offer.

We often tend to think of life in terms of forward progress only.  We do, however, hold within us all the previous stages of development, and we often need to access the appropriate energy or behaviour of a previous stage as it is demanded of us in a particular situation. There is movement in the spiral and this movement is ongoing.

Life is not static. Energy is forever transmuting, emotions fluctuate, thoughts float in and out of the mind like clouds in the sky and the body goes through cycles of well-being and illness. We move backwards and forwards between the gross, subtle and causal states and dreams sometimes seem more real than “reality”.

But it has been a deep experience for me this year, that beyond all of this, there is a stillness, an unmoving silence which holds all and from which all things come into being.

In the hectic of the days, it has become my practice to slow down and mindfully focus on my breathing to rediscover this place anew each time.

Aum. Then silence.

For the Hindus, the holy syllable AUM has a special meaning. The A sound represents waking consciousness, U dream consciousness and M deep sleep.   The silence that surrounds the syllable is said to be the unknown and it is called in the Upanishads, “The Fourth”.  The syllable itself is God as creator-preserver-destroyer, but the silence is said to be God eternal, absolutely uninvolved in all the opening-and-closings of the round. [1]

It is unseen, unrelated, inconceivable,

   uninferable, unimaginable, indescribable.

It is the essence of the one self-cognition

   common to all states of consciousness.

All phenomena cease in it.

It is peace, it is bliss, it is nonduality.[2]

Seeking this place of silence we discover that our hectic comings and goings are not the big picture. There is more to life than meets the eye........ if we would only slow down long enough to listen.