Thursday 29 November 2018

Reflections on the Pilgrimage

          This is the last day in India. We don't have to leave the hotel till four in the afternoon for a flight at seven, and I am very happy to spend most of that in this hotel room away from the pollution outside. And I thought I'd like to say something about the last month.

          Well, it's improved my tai chi since I've been trying to teach it to someone for about half an hour almost every day.

          Most days I've just been eating breakfast and getting by the rest of the time on fruit and the odd biscuit. I'm happy to have lost a bit of weight, maybe half a stone, and if that's the case, I'm very happy with that. Of course, I haven't been drinking or taking drugs or doing anything you shouldn't do on a pilgrimage, but I want to keep losing weight and I think that shouldn't be too difficult now that it's started to come off. I'll just have to stay clear of the beer and the off-licenses most nights.

          The meditations and the visualisations have come on a ton what with all the practice, the inspirational places we've visited, and purification of body, speech and mind. I feel a lot more confident now about being able to progress the visualisations until things become a bit clearer. I know how much effort I'd need to put in, but that's something I'll have to take responsibility for.

            There's something about the mind becoming "single pointed". That means that if you place your gaze on an object, it'll easily stay there, I think. Well, that happens. I deduce that for the visualisations, what you have to do is visualise a symbol, say in your navel chakra, and become single pointed with that. The symbol should be "clearly present".  I cannot do this at the moment and it is really going to take a lot of sitting and purification to get there, but it is doable now. Before it seemed nearly impossible. I think this is when mental "clarity" and calming come into their own.

            Well, I'm sixty seven now and should be deid when I'm seventy. I could easily have been deid already. Tempis fugit. The deficiencies of of samara are right in your face as soon as you step into the street around here. At home maybe you can think being reborn might not be so bad, but if you had to gamble of that around here .... Life, in a way, would be much better if you only had to do it once!!

            Anyway, when I get home, I'd really like to boost the meditations up to six hours a day. I've done that before and I'd like to do that again. We'll see.

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