SepticPen ...

you know its been a long time since you wrote your last post. to be frank, you had gotten yourself 'reset'. hard to explain it, but its similar to unlearning everything. so you somehow felt you shouldn't write another post until, you hit a problem.
    
Its not too hard for a problem to find you once you have reset. You work long days, cause when you lie down, you don't want to be able to think,you want sleep to find you easily.
But yesterday you couldn't sleep. Its back, those old days,when you were forced by life to stay awake at night without sleep to accept and recognize your existence and actions.At first its terrifying. you are afraid to peep inside. You know deep down you dont understand life. but some part of you wants to desperately understand it, and there is also a part which is scared of stumbling upon a possible truth. 


But you want to be at peace with yourself. its really late, in a few hours there will be sunlight. you can no longer lie down, your breathing is heavy,its almost as if you are breathing steel. But you are also tired. You sit up in your bed.


"Why? ... Nothing in life makes sense".The street light is flooding your room and You notice you are casting a long shadow across the floor. You look at it for sometime.... 'the constant companion'. Doesn't your shadow always follow you. is it not always less a feet away. An Old man once said the shadows are the greatest gift you could have asked for, it is the very form of 'Death'. that's how close death always is, less than a feet away.

Suddenly you are face to face with death, even though it had followed you for ever.It is no longer a stranger to you. A role that death plays for you is to remind you of how soon you are forgotten. You do much to impress yourselves upon the world, to make yourselves remembered, to stamp your existence.And yet, as Marcus Aurelius often reminds himself, after we die we are quickly forgotten. Our legacy is short in the larger time span of history.

"All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike" (Book 4, §35 ,Meditations of Marcus Aurelius).


If you have to be at peace with yourself, you have to prepare for things that are likely to remove that peace.

You might want to read my previous post titled “Evanescence”
http://septicpen.blogspot.com/2009/07/evanescence.html

Feel free to leave any comments & please tweet this post if you like it.

I first read this poem in "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche.

"Autobiography in Five Chapters"

1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost . . . I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it's a habit
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I walk around it

5) I walk down another street.


i would be starting a series of posts entitled "The Road to Enlightenment" and another parallel series called the "The Tree of Life". I am off on a retreat for 3 weeks . So the series shall receive its postings very soon.
Most of it has already been started but theres more that needs to be written.i am unaware of many things, thats what the retreat is for.

I am reminded of Krishnamurti's Notebook when this idea had come to me....."time shall teach me what ever i need to learn".This is some thing that is beyond all limits of what i have ever creatively done in my life.