To sit, truly alone, is deeper than any experience; more powerful than any drug.
But can you do it?
Can you stand apart from your creations?
Can you leave the safety of your house and live without a roof or without walls?
Can you look past the prized possession, even for a second, to see if it truly exists at all?
Can you walk, devoid of your desire to conquer and destroy?
Only you will see this through to the end. You and no one else.
The beast rears its ugly head in communion with other beasts, but in solitude, it has no place to hide. It dies in the presence of nothing, and flowers spring up from its corpse.
There is no loneliness in solitude. Only alone-ness…
…and flowers.
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…it is a life unlike any you have ever known…
Very poignant. I love the pictures you take as well. I want to go back to Japan someday just to be able to soak it all in again. It’s been 5 years now, but I have such vivid memories. I’ve said it before, but I envy you sometimes.
Is this painting yours? Another of my loves… art! How cool!
Thanks, Mike.
I’m sure you’ll make it back here someday…just don’t do it now…rainy season. Then hell sets in for about two months.
That isn’t my painting, just something I saw when I went to Gokayama.
I’ll probably begin painting before too long…
I missed the rainy season when I was there… mid-May. Heard all about it though, and saw a movie on the plane ride back about the rainy season. Didn’t look fun!
You’re in Tokyo, aren’t you? I spent my last day there, then stayed at the Shinagawa Prince Hotel. I was in Shizuoka (Mishima, Shimada, Susono, Haibara) for a week. Yazaki, the company I used to work for was headquartered there.
OK, so when you start painting, you’re gonna post them, right?
Thanks, Mike.
Hopefully you’ll still be around whenever that happens, haha. It might take a few years to get there. I’m still busy with other art forms these days…I don’t post any of that, anyway, so maybe I won’t post it even when I do start painting.
Who knows?
It’s like you wrote this for me. I m soooo scared to face the beast. I keep running away from it, and it keeps running alongside…
Thanks, Anjali.
Your fear and your attempts at escape give power to the beast. It is you, in every sense…
@Anjali
It runs alongside because it is within you. The “dark side”, they say. But it’s dark only because we’ve not gone there. It has not been seen. Faced is the word you used but it’s not so bad as that.
This is very interesting. I have been exploring some of those very words myself recently.
Amazing how deep it goes, what has not yet been seen. And yet it’s not even there.
Darkness, as they say, is the absence of light. Absence is no-thing.
Thanks, Davidya.
I don’t know if diligence is the right word, but definitely a different kind of seriousness is needed to maintain that energetic attention from moment to moment. It is beyond the actual doing of it, but it requires the selfless exploration of all one holds dear.
It is a shame that some good people, with vast amounts of knowledge, can so easily overlook their belief in their own importance. It becomes very easy to point out why others might be wrong, or what might be better for them, but they cannot see the folly in themselves.
Even the ‘spiritually inclined’ are not immune to this….and that could even exacerbate the issue, because belief in a ‘spiritual inclination’ might be the only reason they never look within. After all, if they ‘know’ what it means to be spiritual, they must be right, higher, or whatever.
Somewhat similar to children playing dress-up with shoe polish mustaches.
Yes, it is curious how people get caught in boxes called freedom. At the same time, I was having a similar discussion in another forum with 2 neo-advaitists. (non-dualist) They had the very handy argument that any experience, concept or idea they don’t agree with is illusion. Forgetting of course that taking a polar position is in itself dualist. (laughs)
So busy being right, we forget to be here.
Good day Takuin,
“There is no loneliness in solitude. Only alone-ness…
Do you mind to explain this differences……….. please?
Thank you kindly, I enjoy yours articles.
Nitin
Thank you, Niten.
More or less…
In loneliness the person assumes something is missing.
In alone-ness nothing is missing apart from the person.
And thank you for your continued support, as always…
Thought provoking, Takuin.
I will have to contemplate this over and over… and feel the ripple.
Thanks
Thank you, Rizal. Glad to have you here again…
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