Bouncing
We are like a cork floating in the Ocean. I am telling this in relation to our inner state. The Ocean is vast and looks limitless. Especially when you are in the middle of it. It is water all around. There are no waves like you see in the shore, but the water is highly buoyant. Not just locally, but like someone pulling a carpet under your legs from all directions. You can feel it when you go on a fishing boat. The boat is tossed up and down churning your stomach if you are new to it. I had this experience in Mahabalipuram near Chennai. We took a ride into the Bay of Bengal. The fishermen driving the boat were supposed to take us a few kilometer from the shore and show us the seventh century rock temples of Mahabalipuram that were once on the land, but got engulfed by the Ocean. After going in, riding the bounce, we could see a small, charred black rocky top, one of the seven temples built like the one you see on the shore. Part of that trip was also to allow us to jump into the Ocean and float there. But that day they stopped us citing there were quite a lot of jellyfish. Just then I put my hand to feel the ocean water and one of them shouted ‘’take your hand off’’ and I saw those red floating wavy jelly fishes go past.
The other lady who had come in the boat screamed all along because of the bounce and churning and wanted to go back. It was a very different experience. I was thinking of the fishermen who experience this every day. They must be used to it like the way we are used to the traffic and noise. That is also another sort of bounce you go through every day when you commute to office.
Inside of you an Ocean exists. You call it a sea of thoughts. Like the Ocean, every moment is different there. You can never get to the exact point you were in moments ago, ever. It is like you are eternally part of a bounce. You are floating like a cork in the ocean, drifting and tossing in all directions. You do not have any control over it. Like the King who was offered a cure to not think of a monkey, the more you try to gain control, the more you find yourself stupid. It evades you all the time. You can sit in meditation for years. But as soon as you get out of it and go around in this world, you will find yourself bouncing like the cork.
When you go for a jog in the morning, somewhere in the middle you lose sense of the fact that you are jogging. You can see your body, your legs moving rhythmically, but you are no longer in it. Your state is something indescribable. You can completely see the jogging as something that is happening outside of you. Moments later you are that bouncing cork again. What happened in the jog was that you had not imposed any constraint on you. You did not bother how many kilometer you jog nor how fast you go nor if your heart beat was at a certain bpm or not. You simply did that without any goal.
The art of doing things simply, just like that, without any constraints or compulsions, without any calculations, without goals, makes you live life without the bouncing.
