The pause...

Never have I heard you speak.
And yet I do know your voice.
A vague memory of the future
Lurks within me like a thief.
I listen, listen and listen
And I grow weary of the wait.
And in my madness I can hear
Voices spilling from the rocks.
But I do know what they are,
I know that you are silent. 
And then I hear it - the pause! 
The pause before you speak.
No sound yet, but the pause!
A silence as loud as a roar.
 
I know this pause is eternal.
I know you will never speak.
And yet, I am ecstatic...

Drunkenness and Creativity

Drunk on half a drop...

People have said a great deal about the connection between meditation and creativity. I have only half a drop of meditation in my life. So perhaps I am not really qualified to speak about this, but I am going to say a few things anyway since that half drop has been enough to get me drunk. And when people get drunk, they start talking recklessly, don't they? Can't be helped. They can't be blamed for it. Blame the one who gets them drunk.

People think that meditation relaxes the mind by silencing it which makes it creative simply because the it starts seeing things that were hidden by the clouds of chaos. While this is essentially correct, it is a little too simplistic, too easy to misinterpret. And the reason for that is that typically, we do not have any idea about the incredible depths of relaxation that are possible. I certainly do not claim to have experienced those depths in their entirety. And what little I have experienced has certainly not been because of my own efforts. I have simply been fortunate enough to have caught that half a drop from the fountain of Silence.

To be able to step out of the well-beaten paths of everyday thought, one has to first stop walking on those paths. Creativity is the ability to create something genuinely new. For something to be genuinely new, it cannot be born out of just a superficial reorganization of what one already has - it must be born out of absolutely nothing. It must emerge from the void, from Silence. Then surely it stands to reason that for the phenomenon of true creation to happen through us, we must first step into Silence.

From my own meagre experience, I would like to say (not that I have any right to say such things, but I am drunk!) that what happens in Silence is far more than the simplistic explanation that I have mentioned above.

Silence has a life of its own, an intelligence of its own.

So then can one employ meditation to become more creative in the arts, sciences and all the other nonsense that we indulge in? I would say - no, that is not how it will work. One cannot enter Silence with a motive. Motives are loud things. One must leave them behind before one can enter Silence. And then one can only wait in the womb of Silence for new things to be born. Sometimes they may be the things that we are looking for, sometimes they may be something entirely different. All we can do is allow them to manifest through us. The Silence lives on its own terms. We can only allow it to live through us. As it is, what it has much more to offer that we can ever ask for. So it is no loss to leave our little demands behind. They will be satisfied in ways we can never think of (we are just not creative enough on our own).

All we can do is be drunk, even if it is on just half a drop! All we can do is offer ourselves to the magnificence of Silence, to its glorious creativity.

Babbling baby

The middle of the night,
Mommy sleeps.
The moon peers in
Through a shaft of light
And lights up the crib
Where Baby sits
Alone in his world
And babbles on...

*****

I remember listening to Sadhguru chastising people about how scattered they are, about how hard he has to work to bring them into the Here and Now. I remember feeling ashamed of myself as I heard him, and yet I knew that my energies were shamelessly dancing across half the globe. It is really unfortunate that we have so much energy. If we did not have so much of it, we would not waste so much of it. Of course, if we did not have energy, we would end up falling asleep since becoming meditative requires energy. I would like to think that being meditative does not require any effort at all, but I do know for a fact that going in that direction requires some effort. It requires effort to realign these million pieces of myself until they all face the same way.

And yet, scattered though we are, there come those rare moments of blessedness when we are struck with just the right amount of ennui - not enough to cause depression and make us stop living, but enough to cause us to stop looking. Looking! That original sin through which we turned outward to begin with! A stunted little consciousness looking out through two little windows into a sea of nonsense! Just the right amount of ennui so that the eyes close and we enter our own inner world.

No one else. Just a very private world, like a crib illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. No effort to meditate, just a profound silence caused by being where you really, really want to be. Here! Oh, what a wonderful place Here is!

To just be Here... to not make an effort to meditate... to not make an effort to become silent... to just babble incoherently without the obligation to make sense! What an ocean of silence lives in the nonsensical words of a baby!

Tonight I sat in the dark, in front of Bhairavi, the room just lit by the lamp of the gudi. Her immense presence filled the dark room... (She does not sleep!) That is when I saw that baby, babbling in the dark.

Jai Bhairavi!