Did my past year have any meaning?
Will I be able to find more meaning in the coming years?
And how many years are ahead of me?
When I was little, I trusted all adults "since they knew it all". Every time I reached a question without a solution, I had no doubt that the adults would find the answer. Now, that I am in the adult category, I realize how preposterous my views were. Adulthood does not equal knowledge, and certainly, the number of answer-less questions multiplies with age.
In my quest for answers, I found the BBC - documented extreme pilgrimage of Peter Owen Jones, a British parish priest. If you have not seen the three episodes, you can find them on YouTube.
The journey leads to China, where Peter learns to cultivate the sense of non-attachment and realizes that he needs to attain “stillness of the mind”. Towards the end of the first journey, Peter says “…I stopped thinking and immersed myself in the daily life.” I am not sure that this behavior differs from our daily rat race, except for the fact that we try to accumulate lots of useless stuff during the race; whereas, the Zen - blessed monks do not hoard anything material.
In India, Peter’s quest for spirituality becomes more bizarre. The journey starts with the Hindu gathering for the festival of Kumbha Mela on the river Ganges. Peter explains that Hindus believe that they are trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth, and salvation releases them from this cycle. The first part of this episode is dedicated to hashish, festival camps and semi-naked gurus. It is later, when the spiritual exploration is initiated through the road of austerity, yoga, and a quick tutorial on Hindu gods. The culmination of the episode is the cave experience in the Himalayas, where Peter again realizes that detachment from everything might be the path to spirituality.
The third journey is in Egypt, where Peter subjects himself to the life of a Christian hermit. On his way to the hermit caves in the desert, Peter visits the oldest Christian monastery in the world - this of Saint Anthony. Residing alone seems to require more tenacity than ever envisioned. Thus, the theme of deprivation is further developed, and there is also the realization that “perhaps we have too many opportunities in our lives …to make the wrong choices”.
Did I learn anything? Peter’s pilgrimage confirmed that to our spirituality, the material world functions the same way as clothes to our bodies: the material world entraps our spirituality.
The unifying theme of the three journeys is this of being able to detach yourself from the material world and be in touch with nature. In my case, age has brought a degree of detachment from the material world. I have this gnawing feeling that the THINGS in my house are the distractions on my way to the answers I seek, and that the time invested in taking care of the THINGS is a diversion. I find myself yearning to live only with the most essential.
(How about a pair of shorts and a few T-shirts with flip-flops?)
I also have this inkling that only when we let go of every thought and anxiety, we can discern the meaning of life. It is only the contrast between the emotions/states that helps us perceive anything. There will be no day without the night, no poor without the rich, no beautiful without the ugly, no happiness without the misery, and certainly, no meaning without the lack of meaning. Therefore, the deprivation of our senses from human contacts, emotions, and sounds may allow us to grasp the meaning and richness of human life.
Probably our pilgrimage through life should follow nature’s cycle: the same way winter’s austerity and deprivation of our senses is followed by spring's generosity of colors, shapes, and warmth, we need to spend time alone in order to appreciate everyone and everything around us. And then the newly-acquired appreciation will bring the meaning.
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