Perhaps!

Where do thoughts come from? From where do some of your deepest reflections emerge? The insights that help you to reorganize your work and direction in life? No particular place, I guess. Or just about every place if you prefer to look at it that way.

They come while you’re watching the sunset. They come while you’re sitting on the pot. They dribble into your mind at night in the dark as you toss and turn in bed, wishing you could fall asleep instead of having to think about the motley aspects of your life and the people who constitute it.

Insights come from conversations with people, from being with others, and from what you observe around you and within yourself. Mostly you begin to see it all when your mind is quiet, when it becomes a still pool which reflects the world, including your place in it.

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For several years I have been part of a group. This puzzles people when I occasionally say something about it – for example,  during a lull in the conversation or when I am asked what I have been up to lately. “So what do you do,” people whom I haven’t met for a while, or who I’m meeting for the first time will say to me.

I say to them, “Among other things, I’m part of this group. We meet quite regularly, maybe once a week or sometimes once a fortnight.” They look at me askance.

“We talk, we listen to music.”

Faint signs of interest. “What kind of music?”

I tell them vaguely, “All kinds.”

They say to me, trying to make sense of it, “You meditate.”

I tell them, well yes in a manner of speaking. “And reflect about things together.”

“About what?” They ask.

I say to them, “Oh you know, about life.” They nod.

“About relationships,” I add.

They go, “Aha. That sounds interesting.”

“Or let’s say, we sometimes talk about sex.”

Was that my imagination or was there a sudden flash in their eyes? Am I being fanciful or has my statement sparked of something in a region which till a moment back, seemed occupied by polite interest?

Sex. That throws them a bit off balance. They want to know more, you can see the questions hovering on the tip of their tongue but they vanish into thin air, bounce right back into their throats. They’re shy to ask. “About what fidelity in relationships really means, for example.” I tell them and stop there, for a moment reflecting on all the conversations we’ve had during the times we’ve met.

Recently I have been becoming aware of what we actually talk about in our group. About things that are either difficult or too embarrassing to talk about outside of it, I suppose, and yet, they are subjects which need to be addressed. What we mean by sexual freedom, for example. The process of aging. Feeling left out or not being understood. And by talk I don’t mean playing ping pong with words and ideas, tossing off clever remarks about subjects that normally frighten us and  acting like forward-looking talk show hosts.

By talking I mean really sharing. Peeling off the layers which we seem obliged to throw on for the benefit of “the world.” So we talk about our fears about it all, about the anger and jealousies that crop up in our day to day dealings with people, about the sort of things that go on in relationships. Because that finally, is what life is about: relationship. It’s about how we relate to the people we live and work with,  the joys and difficulties which the various connections in our lives bring with them, about our relationship with the environment and the creatures who share it with us. It’s about  trying to find our place in the world.

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But first there is the music, the attempt to create a quiet space in the room and within our minds, from where it makes more sense to speak, because to speak from the usual noise that is going on in our heads, is not quite the same as when we manage to share our thoughts out of the quiet of our hearts. And the hour or so that we spend listening to a mix of Beethoven and Pink Floyd or classical ragas and rock, somehow does manage to at least temporarily quieten down the cacophony in our heads, enough to leave the thought space and enter another one which has more to do with feeling and sensing.

Into the quiet space is where we begin to introduce the kind of thoughts that are difficult to talk about at a cocktail party or in a pub. We talk about what how we see or feel about each other. We talk about change and about whether transformation is a realistic possibility on earth, or whether we are doomed to replay the same old melodrama of anger, fear, suspicion and hate till eternity, that human beings have been enacting since they first appeared on this planet.

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Why do we bother, I sometimes ask myself. Why do we meet once every couple of weeks to engage in any kind of discussion about things like fear and anger and all the rest? About life and death and the blocks in our minds which so often prevent us from  truly living? Why do we try so hard to learn to talk simply, directly and fearlessly when there are other things to do?

After all, one can spend that time doing business, watching Neflix, gossiping with friends over a drink or doing what Indians seem to most enjoy – ambling through shopping malls. Then I see, perhaps it is a search for love that we are really engaged in, although we are mostly too shy to say so. Isn’t all our striving in life, our attempt to be rich or famous or successful, at the bottom of it all, just a cry to be loved and needed by someone?

Perhaps it is a search for freedom, though it seems to me we are mostly too modest and too broken in spirit, to  really see that it is within our reach. Somehow we don’t seem to accept the possibility that some day it might indeed be possible to walk out into the world unburdened by the fears and the pettiness that hold us captive right now. Because we are mostly used to settling for second best: And that is to be able to move a little more freely within the prison we have lived in most of our lives, bequeathed to us by the generations gone by, pretending that that is where we are naturally supposed to live our lives, instead of in the fresh air and under an open sky like other creatures do.

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Our work at Basicindia is about how we stand in relationship to each other today. About love, about reality, about our personal truth in life. About being free to live for ourselves and each other instead of for the sake of some amorphous long dead culture and society that has been dictating its mores and values to us down the centuries.

Perhaps you too will want to add something at this point, realising that there are things to talk about which you have never been able to bring up with others and which you feel sort of hovering ghost-like within your system, asking to be seen and understood. And then, one day, you may find yourself wandering into a room through an open door  to meet us there. Who knows, perhaps you will end up talking and talking and nothing will change, your life will remain exactly the same. Then again, the exploration might trigger off a little something, a germ of an idea that will take you deeper into yourself, into an unknown space and you will find life unfolding in ways that totally grab you by surprise. In ways that can be neither measured nor defined but which you somehow feel happy about. Who knows?

Perhaps!