i remember the monks at the monastery up in sikkim, i remember their stories of the black hat of spirituality and i remember them calling me to talk to them. i remember vague smiles, vague impressions of faces on crowded streets, ens and karmic connections and the feeling of having encountered a soul that has found another way to live, happier, more at peace and with more daily quietude. or maybe it is the same way, but a better way of executing it. questioning its definition is beside the point. the point itself being that there is another way, there is a better way than letting every day’s grit in your eye blind and outrage you instead of calmly blinking it away –

there’s a lot of things that manage to get me down everyday that really needn’t. most of them aren’t even actual occurrences – they’re paranoid fears of what might or might not happen. i wish my mind had less hold on me – because i know my mind isn’t all there is to me, there’s something else, something more, and something infinitely powerful waiting to be unearthed and feel the sun in its bones, but the ego is keeping it suppressed and hidden because it knows that if that something more is given due power, the ego must die.

so long as the ego is all-important, life is bound to be a rocky, unhappy ride in the choppy waters of samsara. as the ego loses power, i will have a sense of falling overboard, hitting the water, vulnerable, desperate and frightened, but i know all that will happen is that i will discover the water is not half as rocky anymore, and what’s more i can swim, and i never needed that imaginary life-jacket anyway.

i have a curious sense today of how illusory everything about life really is, of a direction all life takes towards higher meaning and an evolutionary rise, of a yearning we all feel in quiet moments when the afternoon light slants in on to a dusty window pane and all you can sense is silence, all-empowering and calming, full of strength and secrets, of that feeling of wonderment and mysticism when you hear of atlantis, or the greek gods, or worlds that came before and worlds that came after and are proven or preceded by worlds as illusory as themselves.

there really is another way to live, and i know it’s staring me in the face, if i only have the courage to look up at it.

and even as i write i realise i have so much to be grateful for, so much in my life that is in alignment with my quest for a deeper truth. it is harder to muse about karma and about higher beings and ways to live if you live hand to mouth, if your heart has been broken, if in this world you have troubles that require all your might to be dealt with. though the monks would say that is the very point at which you are closest to a breakthrough – but it is so much harder to even want to look for it then. i should be thankful for a family that has as much as it needs, for the love of a man who is kindly and puts the good of others first, for opportunities and for, in the words of the bhagavad-gita, athato brahma jigyasa, a human life in which to search for the truth about myself.