As You Like the Ramayana: The Journey Within

“I would be everywhere, as I am right now, a thin tone like the wind, a sip of blue light – no source, no end, no horizon” (William Stafford)

There is ( ) beyond things. ( ) between, around, and through all things. ( ) before things, before time, and ( ) right now, right here. Do you know the sound of one hand clapping? I sit. Effortlessly, I feel the cool air against my forearms. Effortlessly, I hear the sounds of the air conditioner shifting gears. Thoughts meander across my mind, I see them; I am not them. My cramping knee draws my attention. I travel down my chest, winding along ribs and then weaving through intestines, and seeping through my thigh, I attend to the tightening muscles in my bent knee. Name it: cramp. I notice that cramp, I am not that cramp. My breath raises my chest and is then pressed upward. My belly sinks and, if I can hold my attention there, I notice how deep my belly is. More thoughts wander through my mind. Observe. I see those thoughts; I am not those thoughts. If I can find the state of concentration in which I release concentrated effort, then I can follow by breath as it moves throughout my body. It is so peaceful.

I woke up early this morning to try to reestablish my morning sitting routine. Morning is much better than night, I have discovered. At night, I totter between sleep and rambling daily stresses. In the morning I am fresh, and if I sit I can maintain some of that freshness through my day. I am a complete novice, in many ways a dilettante. The typical monk rises sometime between three and five and begins his day in reverent silence. Ken Wilber awakes at four each morning and meditates, lying in corpse pose, for one to two hours. It is a practice to which few, especially in the West, commit themselves fully and which few maintain. Not that everyone should, of course. It most certainly is not the path for everyone. When Ho asks Swallow to reveal the secret to her vision, she tells him that she attained an altered state of absorption by practicing the breathing exercises the Master taught her. Ho replies: “Oh that… I know; his Honour one day offered me instruction of the sort but it was so hard and long and wanted such effort that I gave up, and asked him would he not show me a short cut” (1070). Ho thinks that his Honour gains wisdom by some occult art, not by sitting quietly and merely concentrating. William Stafford portrays the inability to see freedom just in front of him by comparing the life in which he has blind faith to a self-imposed prison: “I bent my skill to keep my cell locked” (William Stafford). If only Ho knew that this is what he is doing. His practice seems unspectacular compared with powers there obtained. But the reports of experiences along the meditative path are of a different order than the experiences most of us have in our daily lives.

Contemplation is a way to discover ultimate degrees of many conditions E 603 seeks to hammer home: unity, connection and connectedness, self-discovery. Contemplation is a tool used by many great sages. Jesus retreated into the desert for forty nights during which he faced Satan’s most odious temptations. He persevered and grew stronger in certitude and self-knowledge. Delving into the self can lead to a place outside of time, to a place that is not really a place and that cannot be described by words or thoughts or feelings because it is “outside” all of those. “The Ramayana… questions the boundaries between reality and eternity” (Charlotte Beall) by telling a tale that fades between realities, bending in and out of trance and myth, describing states of meditation. Sita steps into the final fire, what Joseph Campbell describes as “the crossing of the return threshold.” She reaches a state outside of time “a state of perception of immense spaces, vast blue horizons, distances incalculable, as between star and star.... There was no trace of fear or strangeness, as though all she contemplated was herself” (1069). This state could have saved the existentialists from their malaise and may have utterly consternated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for who “there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure” (Rosencrantz or Guildenstern – Clip). In a literary mythological sense, “the hero… is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Joseph Campbell). And this is precisely how his Honour, while journeying through his past life vision, appears to Ho , who says, “wherever I touched him he was cold like an image and as stiff” (1012). The princely hermit is not dead, though “the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation” (Campbell). He has merely found “the higher silences within” (Campbell), the silences that Ho disdains in hopes of finding fireworks.

Long-time meditators might tell you that they have reached a state of constant consciousness. They maintain awareness continuously through the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states, and find states beyond those as well. Contemplatives would tell you that what most call reality is a “wide and universal theatre” (1088). In a state of constant consciousness it is possible to “hold death awhile at the arm’s end” (1086), to witness the mortal fear of dying and to transcend that fear. It is odd how when I look for themes – especially transcendent ones – in literature, I always find them. I discern the message I want to hear in the Bible and in modern physics and in Emerson and in our English class. I’m sure Campbell would admit the same disease. His life taught him, “It will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find” (Joseph Campbell).

“And you discover where music begins / before it makes any sound, / far in the mountains where canyons go / still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.” (William Stafford)