Waves in the Ocean of Oblivion

I still have not made up for my lost week of blogging, hence I'm trying again to post two articles this weekend, since I did not manage to do so last week. It's still Friday evening and the weekend has just begun. Isn't this the best time of the week?

Last weekend was also a busy one for me, as I had to take care of a lot of family matters. Gone are the days when I could go out and not return home; sleep in the office or in my car or just hop on a train ride to nowhere. Circumstances change in life, but one thing has remained constant throughout: I've not lost my enthusiasm for knowledge and spiritual insights. All the articles in my blog over the last 20 years have borne out that fact.

I live for insights. An insight is a moment of clear-seeing--discerning a pattern from a mass of information. It's seeing the hidden connection between things, oftentimes confirming a hunch I've always had. Writing this blog is part of this quest for insights. A lot of them emerged during the act of writing, which I consider a sacred act.

To write is to commune with the gods. All inspiration is divine in origin, for it comes from that Collective Unconscious which artists and philosophers tap into. The prophets of old get their revelations from god because they have cultivated minds that are capable of peeking into this source of insight.

We create God and gods because that is the most natural thing for the human mind to do. Archetypes are mental attractors or reccurent patterns that inevitably form when human minds are allowed to self-express. All works of art are abstract representations, glimpses of this unconscious wellspring of wisdom.

The more we dwell upon the nature of things, the more we realise that the reality that we see around is quite 'unreal'. Unreal in a sense that we can never know what's out there, because what we experience is only a small slice of it, interpreted through our senses. And there is really no Self inside that looks at the Cartesian theatre screen, deciding whether to switch channels. There's only the experiencing and no experiencer. The enduring soul or spirit that you feel animating your body, heart and mind is nothing but an emergent pattern, which persists momentarily.

If we use the language of Advaita Vedanta, we can say that ultimate reality is Brahman and the mind and the world are but manifestations of it. When the ocean is perturbed, waves result and each wave-mind thinks of itself as a permanent existence, propagating across space, swelling on occasion into tsunamis,  as mortal souls like us do across time, aspiring to grandiose dreams. 

Waves go about with their petty concerns oblivious of the ocean of which they are a part of. Each wave thinks that it is unique and worth preserving. And when they do subside, they imagine themselves resurfacing elsewhere in some wave heaven, in full glory, retaining the perfection of their remembered forms.