The Ashram Within

It’s been a interesting road to recovery, giving me plenty of time to contemplate all kinds of things. The not so good is it has given me all this time to look at what’s been crashing around us in the human world. And that’s been a lot. It seems that the species is finding more and more wars to distract itself from the looming disasters that are caused by environmental damage. But we are good at that. We have found so many clever ways to distract ourselves that there are whole industries dedicated to just that process. It’s been so easy to get on Facebook and other social media sites, read papers, follow the headlines. It has done my head in, increasing the feeling of powerlessness not only from the wee viral beings that have been having their way with me, but from the sheer enormity of what the species has got itself into.

‘Course there’s another aspect of this. I’m old, and don’t have another decade of activism left in me. So I ask myself, “was it all worth it?” I had such a positive, some would say Pollyanna, attitude to changing things for so many years. Mind you, that was a long time ago now. In the intervening decades I have found the balance between the so-called negative and the equally as fragile positive, feeling all along that somewhere there, my species would discover that too, if I was patient. But like all of us, I misjudged the bigger timescale that we sit within, expecting things to happen faster and faster, ignoring the glacial pace that is the world turning. It’s the human condition.

When we were all split up into isolated little groups of people experimenting with ways of being, we were close enough to Life and Death to recognize that it’s a dance. In between the two we get this rare opportunity to play with creativity. But that’s all we were doing. We accepted Death as we accepted the breath of life.

Tihei mauri ora! I am alive!

I just wrote a book about the consequences of believing that we owned Life, always in hope of creating a crack in the veneer of illusion that we in the West have created out of the realities of existence. Right now, it feels too little too late, but I do what I can. And that, of course, is the point, isn’t it? We do what we can. There is nothing I can do about Gaza, or The Ukraine. Nothing I can do to change the attitude of Australians towards the wonderful people that they tried to exterminate but failed. No hope of changing the economic jerrymander that keeps so many impoverished to line the pockets of the few. Nothing!

So, I thought last night, what can I do? Nothing physical that’s obvious. But we are not physical, are we? Physics has reached the point where it recognises the ethereal nature of the building blocks that make us up, but in the world of non-westerners there has always been the understanding of a deeper something that underpins this world. As I approach my own end, no matter what causes it, I have an increased sense that the solution is in that energetic space some people call spirit. Not the structures of organised religion. No. But in the underpinning of Life itself, something was there to build it all on.

We are good at ignoring what we can’t see. Air we only recognise when its blown about as wind. Electricity is only visible when we flick a switch. The non-concrete is everywhere; water that our body is floating in, feelings that flow through us constantly, and thoughts that come and go all day. But we have revered the concrete. The unseen is the closest approximation that I can get for the word spirit. So if we no longer ignore it in favour of all that is presented before us, what happens? If we turn off the TV, where do all the stories go? If we get off scrolling Facebook, will we miss something important? What we will get is more spaciousness to live out our lives with, no matter how long they will be. But that scares us. We don’t want space because anything could happen in it. We have become so scared of something that underpins the whole of existence. We have been taught not to trust it; to only trust what we can see. But that is a minuscule part of the whole. Maybe it’s time to expand our scope of possibilities for Life and allow the Unseen to find us, to start a relationship with it and see what the outcomes look like? To embrace change can only benefit us because the existent situation is untenable.

How to do that is different for everyone. I personally found myself reaching out into the sea of the unknown for the last couple of nights, allowing my brain to wander and contemplate the nebulous, which is actually impossible, so I fell asleep. However, the obvious idea is to let go of control of what happens, understanding that we are incapable of controlling anything anyway. In which case we have no alternative but to trust the rightness of what occurs, whether it is what we prefer or not.

So what’s this about an Ashram? In India it is common practice in old age to sell up everything and retire to live in an Ashram, dedicating the rest of their lives to the practices of their spiritual path. There aren’t the facilities for that to occur in the West. Indeed, there are no facilities in this culture for anything other than the religion of money. But we don’t need to be old, retired or have an Ashram to go to, and I don’t think an old-people’s home is quite the same thing. However, no matter how old we are there is time to seclude ourselves from the mess that is developing all around us. We need to build an inner Ashram, refuge, sanctuary, call it what you will, that allows us to take a leap back from the materialism that the physical world has come to represent. We need an inner shift into that unknown place where everything and nothing takes place. You could call it meditation, revery, silence or tuning out. Whatever you want to call it, it represents allowing your minds to detach from all the existing structures and take a journey away from it all, often. Switch the TV off. Put the book down. Disconnect the phone. Put a sign on the door that says Do Not Disturb, and just be somewhere else for a bit. It's.Not.That.Hard.